Taste is now corporate

the word taste is already weird now.

taste was quieter. you didn’t really claim it. people just noticed.

someone would make something and it would just feel right. a product, a song, a tiny library, a paragraph, even the way a room was arranged. nothing was trying too hard. it just had a point of view.

and you would be like, yeah, this person has taste.

and it actually not because they said they did… mostly because they didn’t.

but now the corporate people found it. and they can’t just leave it alone.

so now every vc is talking about how taste is the moat. every startup wants engineers with taste. “code is dead and taste is what is left”

yeah yeah sure.

the funny part is that most of these people do not seem to like the thing taste actually asks from you.

taste asks you to notice things slowly. it asks you to care about details that are hard to explain. it asks you to say no to things that would probably perform well but would make the whole thing worse.

that is not how most companies want to work.

companies want reasons. they want numbers. they want the graph to go up. they want to know why this thing is here and why the other one is not. and that is fair, i guess. people have to run businesses.

but taste does not always arrive with a clean explanation. sometimes the answer is just: this feels wrong, and that is a very annoying answer in a meeting.

so instead of letting taste be this weird human thing, they make it safe. they turn it into a look. a style. a tone of voice. a set of signals.

and now people are literally making taste skills for ai agents.

it not even a joke. actual skills. visual audit. typography craft. anti-slop. taste audit. one repo has hundreds of them. another has little dials for design variance, motion intensity, visual density.

i get why. ai makes a lot of things that are technically fine and spiritually nothing. so people are trying to give the machine better defaults.

but it is funny. taste became the thing we were told would matter after execution got automated. then almost immediately people started trying to automate taste too.

but that is not taste. that is just knowing what taste currently looks like online.

there is a difference.

and maybe this is what happens to every good word. first it belongs to people who actually need it. then the internet finds it. then companies find it. then it becomes a job requirement. after that, it is over.

taste used to mean you had a point of view, you can feel something in it, a hunch, emotion maybe, it feel right maybe?. now it often means you know the current style or you can recreate the surface of things that already worked.

and maybe that is why the ai part makes it worse. because ai is very good at surfaces. it can give you the shape of a good sentence, the shape of a nice website, the shape of a smart idea, the shape of useful code, the shape of a brand. it can make something that looks like the kind of thing a person with taste would make.

you usually do not need to keep saying the word. you just make better choices. small ones. boring ones. bold ones. maybe taste is not a process. maybe it is just care plus memory. you have seen enough good things, bad things, almost-good things, and soulless things that your body starts reacting before your brain has the sentence ready.

it is hard to fake.

i don’t know what that word is now.

maybe taste is already gone.

maybe the lore is gone.

or maybe we should stop trying to define it.