There’s a common belief in creative industries that ideas are hard. They aren’t. Any schmuck off the street can have 20 ideas on any topic without trying.
No. The problem has been, and always will be, good ideas.
Good ideas are brief. Fleeting. Fragile.
Good ideas are crushed by a boss’s dramatic pause. They evaporate in an awkward silence.
Good ideas need time and space to settle, take root, grow.
But more than that, good ideas require taste.
Real taste.
The kind that samples across time and space. Across disciplines. With lived experience. You can’t tell meaningful stories if you forget to live a life. It’s the trap of many successful comedians - no one relates to black cars, airport lounges, and five-star hotels. Their success removed the struggle and friction that made them successful.
But here’s the uncomfortable part:
Taste is, by definition, a deviation from the average.
Choosing to be intentionally different, weird in a world that rewards conformity. And then confidently standing behind it.
This week I was talking with my French tutor about LLMs. At their core, they’re just averaging engines—trained to produce the most statistically likely next word.
It’s why they’re so good at sounding right. And yet, they fail so miserably at being interesting. Average isn’t where taste lives.
The problem with averaging
We know this pattern. We have idioms old and new for it.
Too many chefs in the kitchen.
Design by committee.
The slow, well-intentioned process of sanding down anything sharp enough to matter.
No one wants to stand out.
No one wants to risk being wrong in front of their boss.
Inevitably, everything converges toward something safe. Something agreeable. Something… forgettable.
Optimizing for offending no one gets you McDonald’s. But taste… Taste is the Michelin-starred chef having the sheer audacity to put three ingredients on a plate—and charge you $300.
Not because it’s efficient.
Not because it’s popular.
But because it’s deliberate.
Opinionated.
Willing to be wrong in a very specific way.
A film by committee gets you Marvel.
A film with taste gets you Tarantino. Scorsese.
Not because they’re objectively better—but because they’re specific.
Obsessive. Singular. Unmistakably one person’s vision.
That’s what taste looks like.
We Deleted the Sanity Check
This wasn’t just true in art - it was true in tech too. For the longest time, coding was the bottleneck. Turning an idea into something real took time. Effort. Coordination.
That friction forced discernment.
Ideas had to be justified. Scrutinized. Argued into existence. Most never made it.
That was a good thing.
But that constraint is disappearing.
As LLMs evolve into agentic systems, the gap between idea and execution has collapsed. A project manager can now just add the button. Or twenty more before lunch.
The friction of “no” has been replaced by the frictionless “why not?”
No sprint planning.
No backlog debates.
No real resistance.
And in losing that friction, we’ve lost the moment where we stop and ask:
Is this actually a good idea?
Because it’s easy to add.
And impossible to subtract.
The Age of Slop
You see the result everywhere.
Spotify started with putting music first. Now it needs a tutorial.
Microsoft Word needs nine menu tabs for writing a letter.
More features. Less clarity.
Some of the panic around AI-generated slop misses the point. It’s not the AI. It’s that barely half-baked ideas are now being realized instantly—before anyone decides whether they’re good. Instead, we rely upon the wisdom of crowds.
We have outsourced taste to the Algorithm Gods.
These systems don’t just make it easier to build.
They optimize for the average.
The same way committees do.
The same way LLMs do.
And average, by definition, has no taste.
There’s a reason the old GNU/Linux philosophy still resonates: Do one thing. Do it well. Play nicely with others.
Great tools endure.
A carpenter still reaches for a chisel the same way they have for a thousand years. Not because it does everything. But because it does one thing, with intent. Shaped by thousands of failures against real wood.
Resistance is what gave it form.
Is my TODO list better with an agentic workflow? Live translation into 120 languages?
Or are we just building things because we can?
Because it feels like magic?
When the world becomes frictionless, ideas are no longer scarce. Taste is.
And without taste, we’re all just hammers looking for nails.
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