Intelligence is now an API

What if intelligence is no longer your competitive advantage?

For decades, you been told the same thing.

Study harder.

Learn more.

Become the smartest person in the room.

That was good advice.

Until AI happened.

One line from my time at MontyCloud has stayed with me ever since:

Think about your own workflow.

You ask ChatGPT for research. Claude summarizes twenty articles. Cursor scaffolds the code. An image model generates ten visual directions before you've finished your coffee.

Few years ago, all of that required expertise.

Now it's a prompt.

So here's the uncomfortable question.

What exactly are you being paid for?

For years, designers built careers around demonstrating intelligence.

Research decks. Competitor analyses. Process frameworks. Case studies with six-phase diamond diagrams. They weren't just deliverables.

They were proof. Proof that you deserved to be in the room.

But the room has changed.

Intelligence is becoming infrastructure.

Like cloud computing. Like electricity. You don't compete because you have access. You compete because of what you do with it.

AI is exceptional at deterministic work.

Math. Syntax. Research synthesis. Documentation. Layouts. Components.

It can execute.

What it struggles with is judgment.

Should this interaction feel playful or trustworthy?

Should this feature exist at all?

Is this friction intentional or accidental?

What should we remove?

There isn't a correct answer.

Only a better one. That's where judgment begins. Judgment isn't knowing more. It's deciding better. Taste is part of that.

So are experience, intuition, context, and understanding consequences.

AI can explain a decision.

It still can't own one.

That's why I think the future isn't about becoming better at prompts.

It's about becoming better at judgment.

The designers who thrive won't be the ones producing the most artifacts.

They'll be the ones consistently making the best decisions.

The future isn't human vs AI.

It's what humans create with AI.

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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.