Hey y’all, 

I’m on a work trip this week in Dublin. It’s chaotic and my social battery is on empty, but I’ve still tried to find time to write in airport lounges and between meetings. I can’t say it’s been focused and productive, but writing is writing and that’s worth celebrating. 

As I’ve ping-ponged around between workshops and team dinners and planning meetings, I’ve been in a surround sound of tech nerds talking about how we build software, and the importance of taste. 

AKA, we’ve all read the same LinkedIn posts and begrudgingly accept that there may be some degree of accuracy to a few of them. 

It used to be that learning to code was the big differentiator in the sector, but AI has fundamentally changed that mental model. There’s this misconception that, with AI, anybody can code now. It’s no longer the ability to code software that matters. It’s knowing what to build. And why. And for whom. 

Those whos, whats, whys, whens, and wheres are typically folded together under the umbrella of taste. Having the right answers to those questions is what typically separates slop from value, at least in how the software industry thinks about it. 

While I agree with my partner that too much of our culture and politics is built on emulating the tech industry, when it comes to reconnecting with creativity and dealing with pervasive distraction, I think there’s a decent lesson to be learned in the pursuit of taste. 

What is taste? How do we develop taste? And why does it matter when we think about the cure for constant distraction?