You don't need taste

In 1628, the jurist Montanus raised a question: A lord sent his servant to buy a house. The servant found a different one — greater value, same price — and bought that instead. Has he done his duty?

Montanus’s answer: you can’t decide without asking the lord. And the lord’s preference, his taste isn’t something you can argue about.

Über Geschmack lässt sich nicht streiten.

In the age of AI “taste is the new moat.” But if taste is subjective and inarguable, the conversation stops there. You can’t argue any further, it’s just personal preference.

I don’t think that’s what most people mean. Taste is just the wrong placeholder for a lot of things you can argue about.

When a design “feels right” you’re recognizing patterns, proportions, space between things. When code “looks clean” you know because you’ve written bad code. When a product “just works” you’ve felt enough friction elsewhere to notice.

That’s not taste. That’s judgment.

And unlike taste, judgment can be trained, studied, argued. It’s pattern recognition, quality sense, product sense, knowing what’s simple, what solves the right problem.

You’ve seen enough to know what works, what “done” feels like, and what’s about to break.

And when you’ve done enough reps, judgment becomes intuition — the kind that “just knows” without thinking it through. That’s not magic. That’s practice compressed into instinct.

AI amplifies your judgment, good or bad. If you don’t know what great looks like, you’ll ship mediocrity at inference speed.

The good news: you don’t need taste. You need reps.