Everything looks the same now, and none of it is bad. Everyone has the same tools, so everyone's landing page is clean, everyone's copy is fine, and it all runs together into one competent blur you scroll past without registering. The floor came up. Nobody ships garbage anymore, and nobody ships anything you remember either.
Every so often something cuts through anyway. You are scrolling on autopilot and something makes you stop, and it is better in a way you cannot put your finger on. Nothing you could list. No feature, no trick. It is just clearly the work of someone who knew exactly what they were doing, and the distance between it and the blur is huge, and you cannot measure any of it.
The thing that makes the difference is taste, and it is the one thing the machine handed to nobody. For most of your career it was optional, a bonus you noticed in the occasional company that had it. Now it is the only thing left that tells one thing apart from another.
You could always win without it, and most people did. When building was slow and expensive, there were other ways to get ahead, and none of them ran on taste. You could spend more than everyone else, or get to the market first and make it painful to leave. Taste helped if you had it, but it was never what decided who won.
Some of the biggest companies alive have no taste at all, and it never cost them a thing. Cluttered, ugly software that nobody could love has printed money for decades, because it got there first, or because the person choosing it is not the person who has to use it. Nobody was paying for taste. They were paying for whatever was hard to get, and taste was almost never the hard part.
All of that held only because things were scarce. Scarcity did the sorting. It let a dull product win on money or timing, and it kept taste in the nice-to-have column, one advantage among many you could safely ignore. None of it survives the scarcity going away.
The scarcity went away, all of it at once. Building went free, and so did speed. The thing that took a team a year now takes an afternoon, and it takes your competitor the same afternoon. Every edge you used to buy with money or time or people is sitting in a text box now, free to anyone who types the request. Whatever used to put you ahead, everyone has it.
That flattens everything. When any product can be built fast and well by anyone, none of it separates you, because everyone has it in equal measure. The only thing that is not equal is the choosing: what to build, and what good even means here. That did not get cheaper or faster. It stayed exactly where it always was, because it was never something you could buy or generate. It is the one input the machine left untouched, because it is the one it cannot make.
People have this backwards. The machine did not make taste valuable. It was always valuable, and always the thing that actually decided who was good. What the machine did was take away everything else that used to matter alongside it, until taste was the only thing left standing. Taste did not rise. Everything around it fell.
Taste is a point of view about what is good, specific enough to choose with. Not a sense that some things beat others, but a position: this, not that, for a reason you might not be able to name. It is a bet on what matters, made by someone who cares how it lands. Everything good ever made came from a person with one, choosing a thousand times in ways they could not fully explain.
Jobs said Microsoft's problem was that it had no taste: no original ideas, nothing of its own in the work. The machine has less. It cannot hold a point of view because it holds all of them, trained on everything, good and bad and the vast beige middle, and it hands back the average. The research already shows what that does: give everyone the same model and each person's work improves while all of it, together, grows more alike. Each one rises toward competent. The crowd collapses toward identical. It is clean because the average is clean, and dead because the average is no one.
A point of view is a commitment to one way of seeing over all the rest, and the machine commits to nothing. Ask what it thinks and it summarizes what everyone thinks, which is the opposite of taste. That is why it cannot be automated, and the reason is simple. Not that taste is too complex to compute. That taste is a self wanting one thing over the others, and the machine is not a self and wants nothing.
You cannot generate a point of view. Someone has to have one.
The machine makes a thousand options in a second. Which one is right is still the whole job, and still yours.
Taste is the last moat, and most people do not have it. For a long time that was survivable, because scarcity covered for you. You could be tasteless and win anyway, as long as you had the money, or the lead, or the lock-in. That cover is gone. When everyone can build anything, the only thing left to see is your judgment, and if there is nothing behind your eyes, everyone is about to find out.
There is only one thing left worth getting better at. Not faster; the machine has that. Not cheaper; it has that too. Better at knowing what is worth making, and when it is right. That is not a skill you can install. It gets built the slow way, by caring about the gap between fine and right for years, until you can feel it without having to check. Most people never bothered, because they never had to. Now it is the only thing.
Every moat this series buried was the same one. The code that took years, the team you had to hire, the estimate, the feature no one could copy. None of them were ever the moat. They were taste, wearing whatever costume scarcity was selling that decade. Code looked like the moat because code was scarce, but the moat was always the judgment that chose the right code. The costumes are gone now, all at once, and the thing that was under them the whole time is standing in the open with nowhere to hide.
It was always taste. It was never anything else. The machine did not take your moat. It burned away everything that was hiding the only one you ever had, and handed you the tools to build with nothing else in the way. Whether that is the best news of your career or the worst comes down to one question, and it is finally the only question: do you have any.
We build. They bill.