"Because AI is making the world faster - and rougher. This phenomenon, which he describes as "AI-driven coarsening," shows up everywhere: Social media posts are increasingly complete and polished, yet oddly lifeless E-commerce pages are packed with flawless copy, but nothing truly persuades you Product proposals from junior PMs are logically sound and well-structured, yet leave you thinking: everything looks right, but something feels wrong"
"AI makes it easier than ever to produce something that is acceptable.But what it produces by default is average quality - rarely terrible, rarely exceptional. We're entering an era where: Building something is easy Building something distinctive is hard In this context, taste becomes amplified.Previously, you might stand out by writing better documents than others. Today, that advantage is quickly neutralized by AI."
AI raises the baseline speed and polish of product work while flattening distinctiveness, producing many acceptable but typically average outputs. Taste functions as trained judgment rather than mere aesthetics, enabling selection among numerous "pretty good" options and deciding what merits investment. Sensitivity to subtle signals and clear standards operate together to identify higher-quality choices. Company culture shapes individual and collective taste through rituals, hiring, incentives, and shared examples. Taste can be developed via deliberate practice: feedback cycles, calibration against strong exemplars, constrained experiments, and explicit quality criteria. Strong taste amplifies differentiation and widens gaps between high- and low-quality products in the AI era.
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