Taste, the Essential Skill of the AI Era
1. AI separates execution and judgment
As the cost of making working prototypes and plausible UIs almost disappears, “good enough” design becomes the default.
- There is no guarantee that a highly polished appearance is the result of deep thought.
- Sophistication that arrives before the thinking does can make the wrong direction seem persuasive.
- The judgment experience that naturally accumulated through the execution process also decreases.
- As generation speed increases, the criteria for deciding what to keep become more important.
2. Taste is judgment that goes beyond “good enough”
Taste is not simply an aesthetic preference, but the ability to read the context of results and distinguish better choices.
- When everyone can produce results at a similar level, the difference comes from selection and editing.
- The ability to explain why this result is still not enough becomes a design competitive advantage.
- Taste is closer to a practice of making judgment each time than to a sense one possesses.
- It is different from turning a specific style into the answer or from putting one’s own sense ahead of data.
3. Judgment is built through three kinds of experience
An eye for recognizing good results accumulates through the process of repeatedly making, failing, and observing.
- Repetition that includes failure
- The experience of launching a product and encountering responses different from expectations creates a basis for judgment that is difficult to obtain from theory.
- Commitment to details that are not explicitly instructed
- The attitude of spending time looking closely at moments that seem small, such as loading states or confirmation flows, makes a difference in results.
- Intentional exposure
- To avoid your sense becoming calibrated to average results, you need to look at work outside your familiar field and outside the algorithm.
4. In the agent era, judgment moves further upstream
Even in environments where AI agents use products directly, human design judgment does not disappear.
- Agents do not feel beautiful spacing, but humans experience trust and a sense of control the moment they delegate.
- What is worth making and what experience should be defined as good are still human decisions.
- As execution becomes automated, craftsmanship focuses on stages before screen creation.
- Craft does not disappear; it is compressed into the fewer decisions humans still need to make.
