Taste Is All We Have Left
(And I’m not sure we’re ready to talk about that.)
So here’s something that’s been keeping me up lately.
I was scrolling through Twitter last week—X, whatever—and I saw another UI designer posting their “workflow.”
They’d used AI to generate twelve different variations of a dashboard in the time it used to take me to sketch one.
Clean. Professional. Honestly? Pretty good.
And I just sat there staring at my screen thinking: What am I even doing anymore?
Twenty-five years.
That’s how long I’ve been designing interfaces. Big studios. AAA games. Places where you learn craft. Where you learn the rules.
How to align elements. When to break the grid. Why that button needs to be 2 pixels higher.
(Not 3. Never 3. If you know, you know.)
I got good at this. Really good.
And now AI can do most of what I do in seconds.
Not all of it. Not yet.
But enough that I’ve started asking myself a question I never thought I’d ask: What’s left that actually matters?
Here’s what I think...
The only thing we have left—the only real differentiator—is taste.
Not skill. Not speed. Not even creativity in the way we used to define it.
Taste.
The ability to look at twelve AI-generated options and know—just know—that number seven is wrong, number three is trying too hard, and number nine is almost there but needs something.
The ability to feel when a design is technically perfect but somehow soulless.
The ability to give a shit about things that don’t show up in the metrics.
I dunno.
Maybe I’m wrong.
Maybe taste doesn’t matter in a world where AI can A/B test a thousand variations and just optimize its way to the right answer.
(That thought terrifies me more than I want to admit.)
But here’s the thing I keep coming back to...
Taste isn’t about knowing the rules.
It’s about knowing when to break them. And why.
It’s the accumulated weight of every interface you’ve used, every design that made you stop and think “oh, that’s smart,” every time you shipped something that felt right even though you couldn’t explain why.
You can’t prompt-engineer taste.
You can’t train it into a model.
(At least not yet. Let me have this.)
So what does this mean for us?
For designers. For anyone in a creative field watching AI get uncomfortably good at their job.
I think it means we need to get serious about cultivating the one thing that’s still uniquely ours.
Not technical skill. That’s commoditizing fast.
Not speed. AI will always be faster.
Our point of view.
Our ability to say “I don’t care if the data says X, this feels wrong for reasons I can barely articulate but absolutely trust.”
The problem is... we’ve spent the last decade being trained out of that.
We’ve been taught to follow best practices. Trust the data. Don’t be precious. Ship fast. Iterate.
(All good advice, by the way. I’m not being precious about this either.)
But somewhere in all that, I think we started believing that taste was indulgent.
That having strong opinions about 2-pixel differences was the kind of thing that slowed teams down.
That caring too much about craft was... unprofessional somehow.
And now we’re in a world where the technical stuff (the stuff we could defend with logic and data) is getting automated.
And the fuzzy, hard-to-defend, “I just know this isn’t right” stuff?
That’s all we have left.
I’m still working through this, honestly.
Still figuring out what it means to build a career around something as intangible as taste.
Still wondering if I’m just being nostalgic for a version of this job that doesn’t exist anymore.
(Probably a little bit, yeah.)
But I also think there’s something here.
Something about how the things that can’t be systematized are suddenly the most valuable things.
The AI can generate the options.
But it can’t tell you which one matters.
Not yet, anyway.
So yeah...
I don’t have a neat conclusion here.
Just this nagging feeling that we need to start taking our taste seriously again.
Start trusting those instincts we’ve been trained to explain away.
Start building the kind of judgment that only comes from caring deeply about things that don’t always make logical sense.
Because pretty soon, that might be the only thing keeping us relevant.
Or maybe I’m overthinking this and AI is just going to figure out taste too and we’re all screwed.
I dunno.
Still figuring it out.
What do you think? Does this land? Drop a comment if you have thoughts. Or don’t. Whatever feels right.
Jon - still figuring it out - Wiggens
P.S. - If you enjoyed this existential crisis disguised as a newsletter, feel free to share it with another designer who’s also staring into the void. Misery loves company.
P.P.S. - If you want more of these uncomfortable conversations, I write sporadically on Medium too. Fair warning: it’s messier over there.