ANDREA YIP

TLDR: AI makes everyone a builder but taste is what will set builders apart.

 

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With the help of AI, everyone can be a builder. Agentic platforms like Claude Code and Codex make it possible to build and launch DIY websites, tools, and apps in minutes that are functionally good enough for the average use case. The result is an abundance of “products” available in world today.

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But if everyone is a builder, who is going to use all these products? And who can actually make money from building them?

 

This is where I think taste becomes the differentiator.

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When a builder largely relies on AI to create products for them, the output trends toward undifferentiated value. Consider a song composed entirely by AI: it passes as music, follows a familiar structure, and is generally palatable, but it’s ultimately the statistical average of a likeable song. It’s functional yet indistinct. Building this way may have some merit, but as a norm it feels wholly uninspired.

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Humans bring taste to act of building: a point of view on how to solve a problem for other people. It starts with framing questions worth answering, understanding what problem to solve, and caring enough about the people on the other end to let that shape every decision along the way. Taste drives deliberate decisions about what matters, what feels right, what belongs, and what gets cut. It slows the building process by creating friction and inciting creative conflicts. And it produces experiences that speak to people's sensibilities: consistent, coherent, and ones they come to anticipate.

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Taste also carries real-world consequences. Builders earn people’s trust, and people begin to rely on what they've built; it’s a form of influence and power. Builders who understand this know they're accountable for not only the product itself but how it interacts with people and how it creates meaning in the world: social, emotional, political, and economic.

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Taste emerges when builders engage with AI as genuine co-creators, deliberating throughout the process, saying “no”, and continuously steering toward their worldview. The danger is in offloading most thinking to a model that has no skin in the game. A builder wouldn’t do this in any other working partnership: it’s careless. When human conviction is minimal, the experience of a vibe-coded app can feel just as vapid as reading an essay generated from a prompt.

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Taste is what will let only a few builders stand out. It's a rare human quality— and it's what makes their work worth paying for.

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Note: The image above was created using Gemini.