Decorating

I bought the "taste is the new moat" take. It cost me 3 months.

Everyone is saying taste is the new moat. I bought it. It cost me 3 months.

The take isn’t wrong. Execution got cheap. The first 10% of every project is free now, and what’s left to compete on is taste — what to build, what to ship, what to cut.

I got redpilled. Started spending my days doing taste work — picking, polishing, v2 rebuilds because the first one didn’t feel right. Three months in, the only meetings on my calendar were with Cursor. So I sat with what I’d been doing.

Here’s the loop. Taste is high-status work — the part you actually want to do. AI makes that part easier. So you reach for AI to do more of the work you already loved, while the unsexy work — talking to users, killing features, running pricing tests, debugging retention — sits exactly where it was.

And it’s worse than that. The work you love isn’t just personally satisfying — it’s the work that posts well. Shipping a new AI thing is the cutting-edge flex. Twenty user calls is a screenshot no one wants. At some point — you don’t notice when — the success of your product becomes likes and bookmarks on X, not the people actually using it. You’re still calling them users. The X engagement is what you’re checking.

Here’s what that looked like for me. I shipped the onboarding flow on a Monday. By Wednesday I didn’t vibe with it, so I rebuilt it. By Friday I’d seen a thread on X about onboarding and rebuilt it again. The 14 trial users who’d already signed up never got a “how is this going” email. Cursor helped with the redesigns. The unsent email was on me.

So I started asking a different question before opening Cursor.

The first version was kind: am I using AI to do the work I love, or the work I hate? On the bad days, I knew I was decorating.

The version I use now is meaner. Would I screenshot this for X? If yes, suspect it.

Most days the answer is yes. Most days I do it anyway. The difference is I see it.

AI made the silo cheap. The work outside the silo didn't get cheap. I haven't figured out how to point AI there. I'm trying