Taste and judgement become the constraint when production is free
You've identified a fundamental shift in creative and analytical work: as production becomes cheaper and faster, the bottleneck moves from making things to choosing what's worth making. Drawing on Jevons' 1865 observation about steam en…
When something gets cheap to make, the hard part shifts to choosing what's worth keeping. Jevons saw this in 1865: more efficient steam engines did not cut coal use, they raised it, because cheaper engines opened up more jobs worth doing with one. Software, writing, and analysis are running through the same pattern now.
AI produces twenty decent versions in the time it used to take to make one. Producing is no longer the bottleneck. Choosing is. Choosing requires two things AI cannot supply:
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AI Misses
Judgment
knowing what's worth doing, pushing back, asking the sharper question
Taste
knowing when something is right, the rhythm of a sentence, the pacing of a deck
Both used to sit invisible because production was the constraint. Now they are the constraint.
[!NOTE] A draft anyone could have pulled from a basic prompt tells you nothing about the person who made it. The one that survived twenty rounds of back-and-forth, pushing, rejecting, refining, is where taste and judgment show up.
Everyone has the same tools. That is exactly why taste and judgment matter more, not less. It has never been easier to be mediocre. The work moved up a level. Most measurement is still happening at the old one.
Related notes
- Short stints cap you at modifying existing things, not creating new oneslong-term thinking
- Cheap code shifts the hard work from production to selectiontechnical leadership
- Cheaper cognition expands cognitive demand rather than contracting itinnovation
- A confident frame gives people license to manufacture criticismsocial license
- A maker's personality becomes most visible at the moment the work fails to absorb youabsorption