Taste Triumphs Over Skill

How AI Shifts Creative Value

Photo by Nick Fewings on Unsplash

I've been turning over a phrase in my mind for the past week, ever since I heard Scott Belsky from Adobe mention it on a podcast:

"Taste triumphs over skill."

It stuck with me because it simply names what's happening right now. Belsky wasn't just commenting on AI features—he was pointing out how creative value is changing.

Until now, you couldn't create without first mastering skills. If you wanted to design a logo, you needed to master Adobe Illustrator. If you wanted to build an app, you needed to learn to code. If you wanted to compose music, you needed years of practice with instruments and notation. Tools demanded technical proficiency just to get started.

But things are changing. Now I can describe an app to AI and watch it appear, or sketch a rough design and see it polished instantly. Technical barriers are vanishing. What counts now isn't execution skill but my ability to envision and evaluate— in other words, my taste.

The Historical Pattern: From Intermediaries to Direct Creation

To understand how we got here, let's look at what building an app used to require. If you had an app idea but couldn't code, you had two options:

Learn to code (taking months or years), or hire a chain of specialists. The process looked like this:

Each link in this chain needed different skills, risked misunderstandings, and slowed down feedback. From initial idea to working product could take months, with each iteration requiring weeks more. With such slow cycles, you couldn't develop taste quickly. Too few iterations meant slow refinement of judgment.

Technology gradually shortened this chain. Website builders eliminated some developer needs. No-code platforms like Bubble and Webflow further shortened the distance between idea and implementation. New tools cut out middlemen and sped up feedback.

AI shrinks this chain even further. Work that needed several experts and weeks now happens in one conversation with AI. The chain has nearly disappeared:

This changes who can create and how fast they can improve their work. Skill requirements have dropped dramatically. Almost anyone can now turn their ideas into reality.

When creation becomes instant and universal, when the distance between thought and thing collapses to nothing, we arrive at a curious inversion: the harder part isn't making, but knowing what to make. The challenge isn't execution, but vision. In a world where anyone can build anything, the only scarcity becomes knowing what's worth building.

The Feedback Loop: How Taste Develops

When designer Bret Victor said "Creators need an immediate connection to what they're creating" in his 2012 talk "Inventing on Principle", he captured something essential about how we develop judgment. This wasn't just another tech talk—it was a philosophical framework that has influenced how many Silicon Valley leaders think about creative tools. Victor, who worked on experimental UI concepts at Apple before founding Dynamicland, emphasized that the feedback loop between creation and evaluation is critical to developing intuition. His principle anticipated the AI moment we're now experiencing, where the connection between thought and creation has never been more immediate. Taste isn't innate—it's learned through cycles of creation and evaluation.

Traditionally, these cycles were slow. A designer might spend days crafting a logo, only to realize it didn't work. A developer might spend weeks building a feature that users didn't want. Each iteration taught something, but the learning came slowly.

What AI changes is the speed and directness of this feedback. When I can generate ten logo variations in minutes rather than days, I can compare them side by side, noticing what works and what doesn't. When I can prototype an app feature through conversation rather than coding, I can test ideas rapidly, developing an intuition for what users need.

This compression of the feedback loop changes how taste develops. It's like the difference between learning photography with film versus digital: when you can see results immediately, you learn faster.

As the Floor Drops, the Ceiling Rises

In that same podcast conversation, Belsky shared another insight that completes the picture: as the floor of creation drops, the ceiling simultaneously rises. This isn't just about democratization—it's about expansion in both directions.

Technology doesn't just make creation more accessible; it expands the entire canvas of what's possible. While tools like Squarespace and Canva lower the floor by making basic websites and designs achievable for beginners, the same technological advances raise the ceiling through new JavaScript frameworks, WebGL, and browser APIs that enable immersive 3D experiences, real-time collaboration, and complex interactions that weren't possible before.

The result isn't a flattening of creative possibility, but an expansion. The distance between floor and ceiling—between what's easy and what's possible—grows larger, creating more room for both beginners and experts to explore.

It's in this expanding canvas of possibilities where there's space for everyone to develop their taste and produce incredible new experiences. As AI accelerates both ends of this spectrum—making the basics even more accessible while enabling the advanced to become even more sophisticated—we're entering a world where taste guides us through an ever-growing landscape of creative potential.