Taste Is the New Moat
When AI can make almost anything, the scarce skill isn't making. It's knowing what's worth making. Craft isn't dying; it's moving up a level.
I trained as a product designer at Parsons. We learned to sketch, prototype, build models by hand and critique each other’s work until the flaws were obvious. Many of the skills I spent years on can now be approximated by software in seconds.
You might expect that to worry me. It doesn’t, and I think the reason says something about where art, design and technology are heading.
Craft has moved before
Every generation of tools has taken over some part of the craft, and each time the craft moved up a level.
When architecture moved from the drafting board to CAD, draftsmanship became less scarce. The profession didn’t disappear. Architects spent less time drawing lines and more time deciding which lines should exist. When photography arrived, painting didn’t die. It stopped competing on accuracy and invented Impressionism.
AI is the same shift, only faster and broader. The craft is moving from execution to direction: framing the problem, choosing among options, and knowing when something is right.
Why taste becomes the moat
When making is expensive, the ability to make is the advantage. When making is cheap, the advantage moves to judgment.
Anyone can now generate a hundred logos, a thousand layouts or a working prototype in an afternoon. The market fills up with plausible, polished, forgettable work. What stands out is work shaped by a clear point of view, by someone who can look at a hundred options and say this one, and then explain why.
That’s taste: a trained sense of quality, fit and meaning. It’s built slowly, through years of making things, studying things and being wrong about things. That’s exactly why it holds up as an advantage.
AI raised the floor. Taste still sets the ceiling.
Craft moves up, it doesn’t disappear
Here’s the part people miss: taste comes from craft. You can’t judge a layout well if you’ve never struggled to make one. The designers who’ll thrive with AI are the ones who understand the medium deeply enough to direct it, like a film director who knows what the camera can do.
My own path follows that pattern. I went from product design to UX to product management, and now I build with AI every day. At Circadence we used AI to prototype user experiences early in discovery, so the questions of fit and design got answered before engineering committed to a build. The AI made prototypes cheap. Deciding which prototype deserved to become a product was still a human job, and a design job.
Where the overlap gets interesting
The most exciting work is happening where all three meet:
- Designers who build. A designer who can take an idea from sketch to working software, with AI covering the gaps in their skills, can test their taste against reality in days instead of quarters.
- Engineers who design. As code gets cheaper, the differentiator in software shifts toward how it feels. Engineers with an eye for experience become rare and valuable.
- Art directing machines. Creative direction (style guides, reference boards, critique) becomes a way to program generative systems. The brief becomes the product.
What I’d tell a design student today
Learn the craft anyway. Draw, build, prototype by hand. Not because you’ll do it that way forever, but because it’s how you develop the eye. Then learn the tools, all of them, and use them to make far more than you could alone.
The future doesn’t belong to people who can make things. It belongs to people who know what’s worth making, and can make it real.