Taste Is the New Competitive Edge
In an age where AI has democratized execution, the truly scarce resource is taste — knowing not just what to build, but what to cut.
AI can generate ten buttons in a single day. The problem is that nobody knows how to delete nine of them.
Not long ago, a piece by Silicon Valley investor Parul Gupta quietly spread through the tech world. It was titled "Taste is the new 10x." The 10x engineer is someone who produces the output of ten colleagues. But that standard, the piece argues, has fundamentally changed. In an era where execution speed is no longer a scarce resource, the true competitive edge is taste.
My immediate reaction: this isn't just about engineers. It's the exact problem I've wrestled with for years — first as a journalist, now as a PR director.
The Democratization of Execution, the Oligarchy of Judgment
Open any writing tool and you'll see it. A press release draft takes three minutes. A slide outline, an Instagram caption, a YouTube script — same story. Code too. Describe what you want and GPT or Claude spits out working code.
So what's actually hard now?
In Gupta's words: "AI makes it trivial to build the wrong thing beautifully." It looks polished. It runs. It has structure. But nobody uses it. Nobody reads it. Nobody trusts it.
The bottleneck isn't execution anymore. It's the judgment of what to build in the first place.
Since 2023, the number of startups globally has exploded. Y Combinator cohorts hit record sizes. App launches accelerated. Yet fewer services survive. That's not a market saturation problem — what's saturated is uncritical execution.
The Engineer as Editor
The case Gupta cites is striking. An engineer spent a week building a search feature. Then deleted it themselves — because they realized a better default made it unnecessary.
That's taste. More precisely, that's editorial judgment.
As a journalist, I used to dread the editor. They'd cut nine out of ten things I'd reported. I resented it at first. Then I understood. That was the act of making the piece live. The red pen wasn't destruction — it was sculpture. You chisel away the marble to find the David.
The same logic applies to engineers. As Gupta puts it: "AI will give you ten buttons. The engineer with taste removes nine." That's the definition of a skilled technologist in this era — not someone who builds more, but someone who knows what to leave out.
Taste Is Not Aesthetics — It's Judgment
An important clarification: the taste we're talking about here is not visual sense. It's not about choosing the right font or color palette.
Gupta's definition: taste is an internal compass that distinguishes what matters, what builds user trust, and what should remain invisible.
Philosopher Michael Polanyi called this "tacit knowledge" — knowing that works without being explainable. A veteran journalist who scans a lede and just knows whether it lands. A seasoned editor who opens a manuscript and immediately spots the structural flaw. A master chef who seasons without a recipe.
This capacity is built through exposure and experience. Reading widely. Watching carefully. Writing constantly. But the core discipline is learning to distinguish good from bad with precision. "I like everything" is not taste. Taste arrives when you can explain why this works and that doesn't.
What Happens When Engineering Lacks Content Sensibility
I see this failure pattern repeatedly in corporate digital projects. The features are extensive. The UI looks clean. Nobody uses it.
Why? Because nobody asked what the user should feel inside this product. Everything technically possible got included. Nothing was weeded out. That's not a technology failure — it's an editorial failure.
Content sensibility isn't just the ability to write well. It's the ability to sense how information lands with a user, whether a given flow builds or erodes trust, why a particular detail belongs here at all. Without that, a technically flawless product becomes hollow.
From an investor perspective, Gupta says the signal she watches for in founders isn't what they've built — it's how they talk about what they chose not to build. What they decided to leave out. That's evidence of taste.
What Am I Actually Cultivating?
Looking back at my early reporter notebooks, I still cringe. Good and bad sit side by side with no clear distinction between them. My judgment criteria were blurry. There was a period when I genuinely believed more words meant a better story.
That's changed. Now, when I write a single-page press release or a one-page brief, most of my time goes into subtraction. What won't I say? Which numbers stay out? Which phrasing chips away at credibility?
Working with AI has made this more urgent, not less. AI gives you more than you asked for. So you need to be a more aggressive editor. If you don't maintain the editorial eye, you end up signing off on AI-generated output that looks finished but says nothing.
In the age of AI, competitive advantage doesn't come from executing faster. It comes from knowing what to build and what to discard. Taste isn't innate. It's built by consuming excellent work, interrogating what makes bad work fail, and practicing the discipline of cutting.
What did you delete today?