AI exposed how many people were coasting on execution alone.
"It works" used to be enough. Now it's the baseline. Functionality is a commodity. If all you bring is the ability to make something work, the tools can do that without you.
Taste is what doesn't get automated
AI can generate code. It can write copy. It can design interfaces. What it can't do is tell you whether any of it is good.
Taste is knowing which template to use and when to throw it away. It's the difference between a landing page that converts and one that feels like every other landing page.
Publishing unexamined AI output is disrespectful. You're asking for someone's attention and giving them something you didn't bother to read yourself.
Prompt skill is a dead end
Prompt engineering won't last. The tools change too fast. What lasts is the ability to iterate — try something, see what breaks, adjust.
The person who iterates faster and spots problems sooner is the one who pulls ahead. Tools keep improving, and the interface matters less every quarter. What matters is the eye you bring to the output.
Experience density
Experience used to mean you'd seen a problem before and knew how to solve it. Now, a lot of those problems have known solutions that AI can look up faster than you can.
What matters is learning velocity. How fast can you pick up a new tool? How fast can you adapt when the ground shifts?
Two people can work for five years. One gets five years of learning. The other gets one year repeated five times. I call the difference experience density. It's the better predictor of who thrives in an environment where the tools change every quarter.
Taste comes from philosophy, not credentials
Taste comes from having beliefs — knowing what you care about and why. It's having a point of view that holds up under pressure.
At Char, we're building note-taking software. Note-taking shapes memory and cognition. That means the quality bar is non-negotiable. If the tool feels wrong, people won't use it. If it feels right, it becomes part of how they think. We can't outsource that decision to a model.
Taste leaves artifacts
You can't fake taste over time. It shows up in what you build, what you write, and what you choose to iterate on versus what you ship and forget.
Someone's GitHub, their writing, the decisions they made when nobody was watching — that's where taste shows up. Resumes don't capture it.
Where this is heading
AI will keep getting better at the mechanical parts. The bar for "it works" will keep dropping. The people who were coasting on technical execution are already feeling it.
The people who have a point of view — about what good looks like, about what's worth building, about how software should feel — are the ones pulling ahead. They care about something the tools can't replicate, and that gap is widening.
