When Silicon Valley Talks 'Taste,' What's It Really Hiding?

Opening

Reader, do you know what the hottest keyword in Silicon Valley has been lately? It’s not AI, and it’s not agents. It’s “taste.” I wrote about this in my book last year, and I touched on it in a blog post 2 years ago too. But lately I’ve had a strange thought. At some point, everyone started saying the same thing. And my reaction wasn’t “See, I was right all along” — it was “Wait, is this actually right?” Because when everyone starts saying the same thing, that’s usually a sign the market has entered its maturity phase. Which also means it’s time to look for something new. (I’ll unpack that chasm theory another time.)

So I looked around, and sure enough, Y Combinator co-founder Paul Graham had posted this on X: “In the age of AI, taste matters more. When anyone can build anything, differentiation comes from choosing what to build.” Cloudflare CTO Dane Knecht chimed in, saying “In 2026, taste becomes the differentiator in engineering,” and OpenAI’s Greg Brockman joined the chorus too. Koen Bok, founder of the AI design tool Framer, declared on a podcast that “great taste makes the best products.”

The New Yorker’s tech-culture columnist Kyle Chayka took this phenomenon head-on. He calls it “taste-washing” — dressing anti-human technology in humanist clothing.

Which raises a question: is the “taste” Silicon Valley is talking about the same taste we’ve always known?

Why “Taste,” Suddenly — The Paradox of a World Where Production Is Democratized

Let’s start with why this discourse exploded in the first place. The core reason is simple: AI has nearly erased the barrier to entry for “making things.”

With coding assistants like Anthropic’s Claude Code, someone with zero programming experience can build an app. Image-generation AI lets anyone produce visuals, and LLMs¹ let anyone write. Technical execution is no longer a differentiator.

So the question that remains is: “What should we build?”

Following Paul Graham’s logic, the ability to choose that “what” is exactly what taste is. He made this argument back in 2002, in his essay “Taste for Makers”: “The recipe for great work is very exacting taste, and the ability to execute it.” The reason a 22-year-old essay went viral again in 2024-2025 is that AI has effectively solved the “ability to execute” part.

Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen took this a step further, arguing that once the AI age fully arrives, VC (venture capital) — the skill of picking out valuable investments — will be one of the last professions left standing.Sure, he’s a VC, so there’s an obvious bias at play, but the logic itself is coherent.

The problem is that this logic narrows the word “taste” toward a very specific direction. It starts calling “the ability to pick what makes money” by the name “taste.”