Taste isn't a screenshot
I keep seeing designers share their “taste libraries.” Folders full of screenshots. Apps they admire, interfaces that inspired them, UI details they want to remember. It’s a lovely habit. I’ve done versions of it myself.
But I’ve started to wonder if we’ve confused collecting taste with having it.
There’s a difference between recognizing that something is good and understanding why it’s good. And an even bigger difference between that and knowing what to leave out.
Steve Jobs said it better than I could: “People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I’m actually as proud of the things we haven’t done as the things I have done. Innovation is saying no to 1,000 things.”
A screenshot folder is a yes list. Taste — real taste — is mostly no’s.
The constraint was always judgment
Alfred Lin from Sequoia recently wrote something that stuck with me. In AI Adoption vs. AI Advantage, he argues that for two decades, the binding constraints in software were hiring engineers, writing code, and shipping products. Capital flowed around those bottlenecks. Competitive advantage was often just about who could attract talent and move fast.
AI is dissolving those constraints. Code gets generated. Prototypes are instant. Iteration is nearly free.
Which means the question is no longer “can we build this?” It’s “should we?”
Lin’s point is that when execution constraints disappear, what’s left is judgment. The ability to distinguish signal from noise, to say no to good ideas in favor of great ones, to hold conviction when the data is ambiguous. That’s what compounds. Clear thinking compounds. Confused thinking unravels.
The gap between good judgment and bad judgment doesn’t close when the tools get better. It widens.
What this looks like in practice
Right now, there are people vibe coding their own todo app, adding it to their todo list, and using it to remind themselves to vibe code a new one. That’s not a critique — it’s genuinely how you learn to build. But it does make Things an interesting thing to look at.
If you’ve used it, you know it feels different from other task managers. It’s not just that it looks good — though it does. It’s that it feels considered. Every interaction has been thought about. Nothing is there by accident.
That didn’t happen because the team had a good Dribbble board. It happened because someone said no to hundreds of features that would have made Things more powerful on paper and worse in practice. The craft is visible. But the restraint is what makes the craft matter.
That kind of restraint is hard. It requires conviction. You have to believe — without always being able to prove it — that the thing you’re not building is the right call.
Who this is actually about
I want to be careful here, because I’m not talking about people who are new to building. The weekend builders, the indie hackers spinning up their fifth productivity app — they’re learning something genuinely valuable. They’re developing intuition by doing. That’s how it works.
What I’m less sure about is experienced professionals — designers, product people — who’ve started measuring their output by volume. Fifteen apps shipped. Twenty experiments running. A new launch every week.
Shipping a lot isn’t the same as building well. And in a world where anyone can ship anything, the signal you’re sending with volume isn’t “I have great judgment.” It’s “I haven’t figured out what I actually want to say yet.”
I wrote recently about how AI will happily design the wrong thing for you. The tools are neutral. They amplify whatever you point them at. Strong judgment gets faster and more focused. Weak judgment gets noisier. The tools don’t fix the underlying problem. They just make it more visible.
The harder skill
So what does it actually take to develop judgment?
Not a bigger screenshot folder. Not more launches. Not faster iteration for its own sake.
It takes slowing down enough to ask whether the thing you’re building is worth building at all. Whether the feature you’re adding is solving a real problem or just filling a roadmap. Whether the app you’re designing needs to exist, or whether you’re building it because you can.
That question — should we? — is harder than it sounds. It requires understanding users well enough to know what they actually need, not just what they say they want. It requires understanding the business well enough to know what moves the needle. It requires enough confidence in your own judgment to say no even when someone is excited about the idea.
Taste, in the sense that actually matters, is the accumulation of those decisions. Not the screenshots you’ve saved. The calls you’ve made — especially the ones where you chose not to build something.
The tools have never been more capable. That’s real, and it’s exciting. But capability without judgment is just a faster way to build the wrong thing.
The ceiling has gone up. That’s good news — for people who already know what matters.