Taste is the moat

Rough thought, planted early. I don't fully believe it yet, but I keep circling it.

When the cost of building something drops toward zero — better frameworks, better models, better tooling — the bottleneck moves. It stops being "can you build it" and becomes "do you know what to build, and can you tell when it's actually right." That second thing is taste, and it doesn't come from the tools.

Taste is annoyingly hard to fake: it's the accumulated residue of shipping things, watching real people use them, and feeling the gap between what you made and what you meant. It's also why Owning the whole thing and taste reinforce each other — judgment across the whole surface is exactly the thing a specialist tool can't hand you.

Open questions I want to grow this note into:

• Is "taste" just pattern-matching on a lot of reps, or something else?
• Can it be taught directly, or only earned?
• Where does it not matter — where is raw correctness the only thing that counts?