Taste is the new core skill

When anyone can generate code, the scarce skill is knowing which generated code is good.

Taste is what tells you:

• This abstraction is premature; ask for the simpler version.
• This handles the demo but not the real input.
• This is technically correct but a maintenance nightmare.
• This is almost right — and here's the specific thing to change.

You build taste the old-fashioned way: by reading a lot of code, shipping things, and seeing what breaks. AI doesn't replace that experience — it makes it more valuable, because now your judgment is the bottleneck and the differentiator. The person with taste ships solid software fast. The person without it ships fast and then drowns in bugs.

Here's the uncomfortable corollary: AI raises the floor for everyone, which means it flattens the advantage of knowing syntax and sharpens the advantage of having judgment. The juniors who lean on it to skip learning will plateau, because they never build the taste that tells them when the output is wrong. The ones who use it to ship more and read more will compound. Same tool, opposite outcomes — and the difference is entirely whether you stay engaged with what comes back.