Taste > Intelligence: Why Knowing What to Build Is Worth More Than How
You hear: "You won't lose your job to AI. You'll lose it to someone who uses AI." That's half-true. The full version: you'll lose it to someone with better taste.
Intelligence is commoditized
ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini — these tools can code, write, analyze, summarize. They do it better than most humans, and they improve every month. Raw intelligence — knowing how to do things — is no longer a competitive advantage.
What remains rare is taste: knowing what to do, when to do it, and when not to. It's the ability to say "No, that won't work" in front of a solution that looks logical on paper but will fail with real users.
The 4 pillars of taste
1. Stop competing on "smart"
Let AI be the encyclopedia. You be the author. Don't be the person with all the answers — be the one asking the right questions. Value is no longer in knowledge, it's in judgment.
2. Practice strategic subtraction
Don't ask "What can we add?" Ask "What can we remove?" The best products aren't the ones that do the most. They're the ones that do the right things, and nothing else.
3. Seek poorly defined problems
Checklists, everyone can follow — including AI. Real value lives in the fuzzy: ambiguous projects, vague requests, chaotic situations. Comfort with ambiguity has become a form of job security.
4. Honor your scars
Don't hide your failures — analyze them. Every failed project, every painful pivot, every hard-learned lesson is a data point forming your intuition. It's what lets you say: "That works logically, but humans will hate it."
My chaotic path, my advantage
My professional path looks nothing like a straight line: mobile apps, connected hardware, national television, venture-backed startup, multi-agent AI systems. At every turn, mistakes. At every mistake, taste.
The music app with 2 million downloads and €7,000 profit taught me that technical success means nothing without business success. The failed hardware product taught me that timing matters as much as quality. Enterprise integrations taught me that technical debt is a choice, not an accident.
Taste isn't learned in a course. It's forged in experience — especially in failure.
What this means for you
When you work with me, you're not paying for code. AI can generate code. You're paying for the judgment of someone who has seen enough projects fail to know which ones won't work before they start.
That's the difference between asking AI to build a product and asking someone with taste to tell you which product to build. The first approach is free. The second saves you months.
The question to ask yourself
Next time you launch a project, don't ask "How do we build it?" Ask yourself first: "Should we build it?"
That's the question AI will never ask you. And it's the only one that truly matters.