One of the best lines I heard at MontyCloud: "Intelligence is commoditized. With AI, intelligence is an API call. What matters is execution."
It's true. And it's uncomfortable.
Most designers I know are still performing intelligence — complex process decks, elaborate research frameworks, lengthy case study presentations with six-phase diamond diagrams. All of it is armor. Proof that you belong in the room.
But the room has changed. Anyone can generate a research synthesis, a competitor analysis, a design rationale in minutes. Intelligence is no longer scarce.
What's scarce is taste.
Taste is not something you build in a classroom. It can't be taught in a course, and it definitely can't be automated. It comes from years of looking at work that's better than yours. From noticing why something feels right before you can explain it. From sitting with bad output long enough to understand exactly why it's bad.
AI is getting genuinely scary at structure. Give it a layout, a logic problem, a component architecture — it will execute. Mathematical precision, consistency, speed. All there.
What it can't do is taste.
You can reverse-engineer craft. You can formula-fy aesthetics. But taste lives in the gap the formula can't close. And that gap is where designers still matter.
Stop performing intelligence. Start building taste.
Credits & further reading
- Taste is Eating Silicon Valley — Anu Atluru (workingtheorys.com). The argument that taste is becoming the scarce resource in a post-AI world. The framing in this note that "intelligence is commoditized, taste isn't" runs parallel to her thesis. Worth reading alongside this one.
- The line "intelligence is commoditized, with AI it's an API call" came up in a conversation at MontyCloud. I don't know its original source — it may be widely attributed. But it's the most concise version of an idea that's been building for years across product and design circles.
- Abhinav Chikkara, 10k Designers — his session on taste (referenced separately in the taste note) is the practical companion to this more philosophical one. If this note raises the question, that session starts to answer it.
- The Creative Act: A Way of Being — Rick Rubin. Not a design book. But his description of the artist's role as a "receiver" who curates and filters rather than invents from nothing is the best articulation I've found of what taste actually does. Especially relevant as more creation becomes automated.