Taste & Craftsmanship

I saw this post on X last week that captured something I've been thinking about:

the coolest part of building anything right now isn’t even the thing you're doing necessarily.. it’s the story you get to tell about how you made it.

the tools are absolutely ridiculous. it’s like narrating your way through a magic trick in real time.

“oh i typed some nonsense to something & it replied with code that worked.”“i pushed a button & a voice spoke back.” “i sketched a dream & it came to life in 3 seconds.”

in many ways the process has also become the product. the story is also the flex.

Humans are naturally generative — we like to invent new things. Today, we're living through the first moment in history where humans are co-creating with machines at the speed of thought. What used to take months now takes weeks with tools like Cursor. Claude has become my greatest pair programmer — I'm resolving bugs in seconds that would have taken me hours on Stack Overflow. As a result, we're all shipping fast. When building a feature is as easy as prompting a LLM and the barrier to creating complex software approaches zero, we have to win on an entirely new dimension.

Software has become a commodity. But commodity is a good thing — it signals that something has become really useful, universally adopted, and ready to scale. And once something is commoditized, the opportunity from inventing the thing to making it feel different, smarter, and more you. This is where taste becomes a differentiator.

Understanding Taste

Notion won despite selling a commodity (writing software) in a world dominated by Google Docs and Evernote. Linear built project management software when Jira and Asana all existed. Superhuman in the world dominated by Gmail. Arc in the world dominated by Google Chrome/Safari. These products succeeded because they're tasteful.

Taste shows up in the micro-decisions: frictionless onboarding, interactions that feel delightful, copy that feels human rather than generic. They seem marginal, but in aggregate, these differences compound until users just feel more at home with your product.

Teams can clone a UI or copy features, but taste is much harder to replicate.

The emergence of "vibe coding" is only raising the bar for what "good" is. It's not just enough to ship features. You need founders and teams who obsess over user experience, workflows, onboarding, micro-interactions, copy, every small detail. And I believe users can feel when something is built by humans who care.

AI has accelerated the importance of taste. Not just functional software, but an emotionally resonant one. Software that makes you feel something. It's the invisible craftsmanship expressed through hundreds of tiny decisions that make a product feel "just right." I recently saw a founder say: "The new hottest role in startups is "Engineers who know Frontend" aka Product Engineer ... Backend engineers can generate UI with AI, but this UI doesn't look or feel good enough to ship. Taste is the MOAT."

And that's both a good and bad news: that not everyone is tasteful. Artistry can't be taught in classes or in user interviews. You can't expect someone who optimizes churn rates to deeply care about how a box shadow on hover makes users feel cared for. It requires insatiable curiosity — to observe, to experiment, to care. Patrick Collison once said something in an interview that has stuck with me:

“Beautiful things” signal that creators really cared about the product.

Taste is perspective that gets expressed through product decisions. For example, Ivan Zhao, who visited Japan while he was ideating Notion. He observed and absorbed the traditional Japanese craftsmanship, minimalism, intentionality, and purposeful. Notion became an extension of that perspective — beautiful, intentional, and minimal. The way Notion hides the UI when you're writing isn't just a feature; it's a philosophy about how thinking and writing should feel.

That's why it's so hard to copy because you would also have to copy the underlying belief systems about what writing — or more broadly, knowledge work — should be like.

Community as Taste Multiplier

Most talk about community and brand is bullshit. Real community does two specific things:‍

It creates social proof that compounds. When you see the best people in your industry using a tool, it reinforces that the tool is exceptional. If people talk about what you're building, it's because they care. And that care signals to others that you've put in the care to build something truly valuable.

It gives you an unfair advantage at improving taste. Your community becomes an army of products testers who constantly use and break your product in ways you wouldn't find internally. This builds a feedback loop which refines your product experience and sharpens your taste over time.

Community helps maintain our confidence in our choices, quietly raises our inertia to switch even as competitors catch up on features.

That's why I believe the best teams operate at the intersection of craftsmanship ⨉ product. As LLMs handle more of the "what", the core differentiation comes down to the "why" — which is determined by the most human thing: taste. And taste is like magic — it's built for humans, not metrics, and it's something that people feel and remember.