“Good Taste” Is Just Experience

“In the age of AI, taste is the ultimate differentiator.”

I keep seeing a version of this on a weekly basis. That in the age of AI, taste is the only thing that matters! Taste is what AI can’t replace!

And it’s not that I disagree with it… parts of it actually make sense. But I think I finally figured out what was bothering me.

When people say “taste,” what they actually mean is experience. Pattern recognition built up over years of doing the work. But calling it “taste” instead of “experience” does something subtle and harmful: it makes a learnable skill sound like a gift.

Think about what the word implies. Taste sounds like something you’re born with; it’s binary: you have good taste, or you don’t.

Except I have great “taste” in engineering management. I can watch a manager handle a difficult conversation and feel in my gut whether they nailed it or made it worse. I can look at a team’s structure and sense something’s off before I can articulate what. I can review a technical decision and know it’s going to cause problems in three months.

I wasn’t born with management instincts, I can promise you! I’ve spent some years managing teams. My “taste” for management is, again, just pattern recognition from hundreds of 1:1s, hard conversations, performance check-ins, projects that went right or wrong.

Which is fine, I guess, until you think about who’s hearing this message.

Picture a junior developer who’s been coding for just one year. He reviews pull requests and sometimes isn’t sure if the code is actually good. He hears “taste is what matters in the AI era” and thinks… well, shit. I don’t have that. And the way everyone talks about it, it sounds like something you either have or you don’t. Like the game was decided before he started playing.

I know that feeling. When I was junior, I’d review PRs myself and genuinely have no idea if the code was good. I’d read through it and think “this… seems fine?” I hadn’t lived through enough production incidents to recognize what “this will break at scale” actually looks like. I hadn’t read enough good code to spot bad code by feel.

Now, after years (16!) of this, I can look at a PR and something just catches. That thing in your gut — something’s wrong here, I’m not sure what, but there’s def something off.

“You need taste” tells the wrong story to a junior engineer, while “You need reps” tells them keep showing up, and you’ll get there.

I wrote about what actually makes someone senior before, as the ability to take something ambiguous and make it concrete. You build that by getting thrown into ambiguous situations over and over until you learn to navigate them. The first time, you’ll probably fail. The tenth time, you’ll get it. The hundredth time, your brain won’t even spend energy on it.

So if you’re early in your career and this “taste” talk is making you feel behind: show up, and keep doing the work. Review PRs you don’t fully understand yet, ship the features, break stuff (not intentionally, I hope).

The taste will come, as it usually does. And if someone tells you that you either have it or you don’t, they’ve probably just forgotten how many reps it took them to get theirs.