Taste Is The New Trend
Hard skills are no longer valuable because of AI.
Even though I’ve been shielded from this reality up till now as a software developer, I can see it coming. AI is coming for our jobs. Easy tasks will no longer exist, and what was considered hard tasks will become the new easy.
The best case scenario is that our jobs won’t be immediately replaced but our skills will still be devalued. As a software developer, I’ve started asking myself this question: when everyone is equipped with AI tools and can deliver baseline-level working code, where is the differentiation between me and some other developer? Or anyone with the same job title? It’s easy to see that coding skills, and many other skills, will quickly become commoditized.
But I don’t think it’s all doom and gloom. There is a way out of this race to the bottom.
One of the key ways to survive our new AI age is to have good taste.
When our world is already full of curated sameness, when skills are becoming commoditized, having the ability to elevate yourself above uniformity is vital to staying relevant. Your taste or style is what separates you from me. But there is good taste and poor taste. And no taste and common taste. Taste exists on a spectrum. Taste is the competitive edge.
Having good taste means having the sensibility to choose the best option out of countless choices. It means knowing what looks good, what feels right, or what direction to take. It’s also means having a style; a style that also feels fitting. Taste is a subtle sensibility that extends to all facets of life: a discernment for everything.
Take, for example, a frontend developer in a professional context. He or she can use AI tools to output the code, the content, and even the visuals for a web app. Everything would work pretty much out of the box. But is it “good”? Will people use it? Is is better than the competitor’s? A valuable frontend developer with good taste may be able to come up with a creative solution based on his or her discernment for typography, colour, copywriting, layout design, visual style, code structure and maintability, framework choice, features scope, data and information abstraction levels, etc.
Generative-AI can give you endless permutations of plausible solutions. But algorithms cannot originate an intentional style. AI has no taste.
Taste is cultivated by years of conditioning—growing up in particular places, being exposed to particular cultures, making friends with certain people. Every experience can affect your personality which in turn shape your taste. Moreover, a person with good taste knows that taste changes over time. As you mature, so does your taste. You reflect and you evolve.
Taste as a core differentiator, afterall, is not a novel idea. Think of Steve Jobs and his return to Apple. Think of his collaboration with Jony Ive in turning Apple into one of the most iconic and magificent companies in the world. The story of Apple turning taste into value reminds us that good taste must come from up top. And the corollary is that bad taste up top can destroy value. Just remember the follies of the other characters in the Apple story—Nokia and BlackBerry.