# Taste is the last moat

> Design · 5 min read · 2026-04-22 · Harald Palma
> Source: https://haraldpalma.com/writing/taste-is-the-moat

---

When anyone can generate anything, judgment about what is worth making becomes the scarce thing. The bottleneck moves from production to discernment.

## Why does taste matter more now, not less?

Taste matters more because generation got cheap. For most of history, the hard part was making the thing — the writing, the design, the code. Skill was a filter, and the filter did quiet work: bad ideas were expensive to produce, so fewer of them shipped.

Remove the cost of production and you remove the filter. Now the hard part is knowing which of the ten thousand things you could make is the one worth making. That judgment — of what's good, what's true, what's worth someone's attention — is taste, and it doesn't come out of a model.

> The scarce skill is no longer making it. It's knowing what deserves to exist.

## Can taste be automated away?

Not in any way that matters, because taste is downstream of caring about a specific audience and a specific standard. A model can imitate the surface of good work. It can't hold the standard for you, decide what to cut, or feel the difference between "plausible" and "right."

That's the reassuring part of this moment for anyone who has spent years building judgment. The tools got better at the part that was always mechanical. The part that was always hard — deciding well — is exactly where human work concentrates now.

Craft was never really about the tool. It was about the standard behind it. That's still yours to hold.