Back to beliefsThesis

Taste as Infrastructure

AI without encoded judgment is commodity. Taste is the new moat.

Taste as Infrastructure

AI without encoded taste is commodity. AI with taste is moat.

LLMs optimize for average, not exceptional. They find the center of the distribution—but differentiation lives at the edges. The next competitive advantage isn't "can we build AI" but "can we operationalize judgment."

Taste is structural, not mystical:

TASTE = philosophy + constraints + output contracts + behavior

This structure can be encoded, deployed, shared, and scaled. Once captured, it becomes infrastructure that shapes every AI interaction—pipelines, agents, interfaces, whatever form.

What Taste Looks Like

  • Philosophy: What we believe about how things should work
  • Constraints: What we won't do, even if we could
  • Output contracts: What "good" looks like for our deliverables
  • Behavioral rules: How we engage, communicate, decide

Implication

Companies that invest in encoding their taste will differentiate. Those that don't will compete on price with commodity AI.

The work isn't "build AI features." The work is "capture what makes us us, then deploy it everywhere."

Contrarian To

"AI will figure out what good looks like from the data."

No. AI will find the average. Taste requires a point of view that can't be derived from corpus.

Related