5 min read#ai #taste #brand #design

Taste is the new moat: why speed stopped being a differentiator

speed used to be a pitch. "we ship in 90 days." we had a line like that on our site too. we deleted it.

not because we got slower. because the line stopped meaning anything.

everyone is fast now

sundar pichai says 75% of all new code at google is now AI-generated (and approved by engineers — the qualifier matters). a prediction-market company aired an ad during the nba finals: one person, two days, under $2,000 in generation costs, playing next to spots that took months and six figures. netflix shipped its first genAI final footage and called it "10 times faster" than traditional VFX. an AI-written blog post costs $131 against $611 for a human one.

when everyone can do that, "fast" isn't a differentiator. it's a default setting.

what abundance actually made

roughly half of all articles published on the web are now machine-written — parity with humans since late 2024. about three quarters of new pages contain at least some AI content. merriam-webster's word of the year for 2025 was "slop."

the subtle part comes from a science advances study: writers given AI assistance produced individually better-rated stories that were measurably more similar to each other. quality up, sameness up. that's the trade nobody mentions in the demo.

people noticed. consumer enthusiasm for AI-generated creator content fell from 60% to 26% in two years.

the economics were written in 1971

herbert simon, before any of this existed: "a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention." kevin kelly in 2008: "when copies are super abundant, stuff which can't be copied becomes scarce and valuable." ben thompson calls where we are now "total content commoditization" — any content you want, on command.

when production cost goes to zero, value doesn't disappear. it relocates — to selection, to coherence, to the thing that can't be generated on request. economist alex imas ran the experiment: human-made artwork gained 44% in value from being one-of-one. AI-made gained 21%. scarcity isn't gone. it moved.

so the valley discovered taste

paul graham, february 2026: "when anyone can make anything, the big differentiator is what you choose to make." greg brockman: "taste is a new core skill" — he even tweeted it in lowercase. respect. anu atluru wrote the founding text back in 2024: "in a world of abundance, we treasure taste." and figma was built on this thesis before it was a thesis — dylan field: "as software gets easier to build, design becomes more important."

designers have been saying this for decades. nice of everyone to catch up.

taste pays. there are receipts.

teenage engineering: 91 people in stockholm, ~$42m revenue, a $1,999 synth in a market of $300 boxes, and the op-1 sits in sfmoma's permanent collection. airbnb cut performance marketing spend by more than half in 2020, called the shift permanent, and traffic came back — over 90% direct or unpaid. uncommon, a craft-led studio of about a hundred people, sold a majority stake to havas in a deal worth up to £120m, six years after founding.

the honest counterexample: temu and shein won enormous reach on pure speed and price. then margins fell, app rankings collapsed when the customs loophole closed, and nobody ever loved them. speed buys reach. it doesn't buy permission.

what taste actually is

not "a good eye." taste is the willingness to choose — one mark, one voice, one point of view — and to keep choosing it while a model offers you ten plausible alternatives per second. AI made making free. it made choosing expensive.

that's the moat.

we build brands in six methods, same order every time. none of them is "be fast."

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