When it took a week to produce a draft, the draft carried weight. The work of making was inseparable from the work of deciding. You didn't make something unless you believed in it enough to spend a week. The commitment was the filter.
Now the draft takes an hour. So you make the draft without committing to it. Then you make another. Then another. The filter is gone, and with it the discipline that making used to require.
You can generate a hundred variations of anything in an afternoon. You still have to pick the good one. That picking is the job now. The job did not get easier. The job got harder, because you have to do it a hundred times more often.
The new skill is not making. It is pointing.
What the shift actually cost
The tools have lowered the cost of production to something close to zero. They have not lowered the cost of judgment. That cost has always been high — it requires experience, accumulated context, and the slow, difficult work of developing standards you can actually defend — and the tools do not touch it.
Which means the gap between people with taste and people without has widened. Before, talent for execution could substitute for taste. Make it fast enough, make it technically accomplished enough, and the underlying judgment mattered less. People would respond to the skill even if the thing being made with skill was only moderately worth making.
That buffer is gone. When execution is cheap and universally accessible, what you make is all that's left. The standard for "worth making" just went up.
What taste actually is
Taste is not preference. Preference is easy — you like this, you dislike that, the preferences are yours and don't require justification. Taste is something harder: a developed sense of what works, built from extensive exposure to what has worked before, combined with a specific set of values about what you're trying to do.
A person with taste in a domain can tell you not just what's good but why — can articulate the principles, trace the standards, explain what's being sacrificed when something is merely acceptable. That articulation is what makes taste transferable and defensible. It's what distinguishes taste from preference.
You build it the same way you've always built it: by consuming a lot, consuming carefully, and spending time with the question of why some things work and others don't. There is no faster path. The tools don't offer one.
The old skill is now more valuable
The people I see thriving are the ones who invested in taste before the tools arrived. They have standards. Those standards don't require revisiting every time they generate something new. They have a calibrated sense of what they're trying to produce, which makes evaluating any given output fast and reliable.
These people use the tools for tremendous leverage. They generate quickly, evaluate quickly, and discard quickly. The speed is real. But it requires the judgment to be in place already. Without the judgment, you generate quickly, evaluate slowly or not at all, and keep too much. That is a different result.
Developing taste in a noisy environment
Three practices I've found useful:
Maintain a file of things you admire. Not for copying — for calibration. When you're evaluating your own output and you're not sure whether it's good enough, read three things from the file. The contrast will tell you more than any rubric.
Force yourself to articulate why. When you reject something from your own output, write one sentence explaining the rejection. "Not quite right" is not a standard. "The opening buries the central claim" is a standard. Over time, this practice makes your standards explicit, which makes them more reliable and more consistent.
Ship less than you make. The discipline of not publishing everything is the discipline of taste applied to your own output. If you publish everything the tools generate, you're not exercising taste — you're abdicating it. The unpublished work is where the judgment lives.
If you've spent years building judgment in your field, this moment is good news. Everything got cheaper except the thing you built. If you've been coasting on execution, it's time to start building taste. The window for the shortcut just closed.