Taste, artistry, and judgment

"AI is going to take my job," someone in tech tells their therapist.

"I'm prompting myself out of a job," someone says to a colleague while pushing Claude as far as it goes, probably ending up on LinkedIn Lunatics.

"Maybe I should just get out of tech." That's where a lot of smart people land after watching the cuts roll through 2026 like butter...."go to the blue collar jobs", says boomers.

But, the anxiety is earned. TrueUp counted 783 tech layoff events in 2025, nearly a QUARTER MILLION PEOPLE, or about 674 a day. In 2026 the run rate is 760 a day. Big oof.

You might have heard it, but taste, artistry, and judgment are about to be the most valuable things you own (along with becoming a systems thinker). Let's get into it.

What people are reaching for

As tools multiply and output goes effectively infinite, people reach for whatever still feels human.

People connect with people.

AI companions and Discord servers do a decent impression of connection, and they don't replace sitting across from someone you trust.

In business, the marketer in me looks for the same thing in a different wrapper:

• Primary customer research / Sales calls, support tickets, surveys
• Information gain / Firsthand accounts. Things that actually happened to you
• Proprietary data / Zero-party and first-party data that paints a picture only you can paint

Search agents and LLMs are hunting for exactly this material, and it's one of the few durable ways a business stays differentiated and authoritative.

But the more interesting stuff sits underneath (or within!).

Taste

Did you ever look up to someone because of their taste in movies, music, food, clothes? You took their word over a Reddit thread with 400 upvotes. You bought what they were selling. You were subscribed to what they were about.

That's the influencer economy in one sentence.

Parasocial bonds aren't always good for us, and they're real: people form one-sided attachments to figures they'll never meet, and those attachments get stronger when connection is thin everywhere else. The industry understood that early and built a $32 billion market on it (Influencer Marketing Hub).

Underneath the commercial version, all of us run a private ledger of good and bad experiences that makes us individuals. It's close to impossible to replicate, which is why marketers settle for lookalike audiences and call it personalization. We are all running off of synthetic this or that or emulate what people are really doing (prompts, personas, etc.).

That ledger is your fingerprint as a human, a user, a creator. What someone posts is their taste, dressed up a little, but still theirs and what they've lived, seen, or survived :)

Taste is the collection of experiences you draw from.

Artistry

The pull to create can't be manufactured...it feels almost supernatural. It shows up as an unhinged dinner party, an unusual angle on a blog post, when people say "the quiet part out loud".

Call it creativity, ye ole' left brain or right brain... it's powerful when it hits.

Sticking to business: artistry colors outside the lines sometimes. Brand guidelines, voice and tone docs, design systems, those are guardrails so nobody drives into a ditch. That makes sense for companies that need control over what goes into the world.

The version I keep running into looks like this. I took a discovery call this summer with a company about to launch a marketplace in a deeply unglamorous industry. No traffic, backlinks, no brand.

Every playbook, human or machine, says lead with the gap analysis and sell them the climb.

I led with the thing they were embarrassed about instead. Being pre-launch is an architectural advantage. Nobody has to unwind ten years of a CMS someone else built, or renegotiate a taxonomy with four internal owners, or explain to a VP why the category page they love has to go. They get to build the machine-readable version first, while their entrenched competitors pay down debt they can't see.

That angle isn't in a prompt. It came from watching enterprise teams spend eighteen months undoing decisions made before they got there. You fall on your face, or see missteps, and you bake it into how you approach things in the future. I still use lessons from 2008 when I got into marketing.

The decisions you make are your artistry. They come out of experience, ideas, and the willingness to break from average. It is kinda about risk, too.

Research led me to find a quote from Wolfgang Messner at the University of South Carolina, where he made the point well in his piece on AI and the cognitive revolution: real creativity takes conceptual leaps, cross-disciplinary thinking, and lived experience:

"AI cannot invent the future. It can only remix the past." Deep, Wolfgang. deep.

AI slop is the antithesis of artistry!

Judgment

Who decides what's "best"? A model can run across most of what humans have written down and tell you, against a defined set of criteria, what the best option probably is.

But do most people give it the criteria that matter? Nope. When I use AI for anything I'm creating, I make it ask me at least 10 questions first (something I find very valuable when working with AI).

"What are the best running shoes?" is a different question from "what are the best trail running shoes for British Columbia in April, packed in a carry-on?" You won't get the same answer, and that's the point. AI answers what you asked with what it has.

Now ask a friend whether you look better in jeans or shorts. You get access to an emotional being's bias, perception, lived experience, relationship with you, and personal sense of style. You get a mirror back. If they're good at empathy, maybe they set themselves aside and give you something closer to objective.

Let me give you a live example of judgment as a rule rather than a vibe.

I built a chained research pipeline out of Claude skills that turns a full day of market monitoring into about an hour of editing. The rule I hard-coded into every one of them: every finding carries a dated source link. Not because the model lies exactly, but because it will hand you a citation that looks right, reads well, and points to a journal that doesn't exist or it comes. I don't want that.

I know because it happened in the first draft of this post. A confident, tidy citation to a publication nobody has ever published in.

The pipeline is fast. The rule is judgment. And the rule only exists because clean-looking data has burned me before.

In business, that's what judgment is, the thing someone builds through history and pedigree. I was Head of SEO at BrightEdge, led AI and Search at Intuit where LLM referral traffic grew 769% and converted about 4% better than other channels, and ran Market Insights at Brandlight, an AI visibility platform.

When I say a product has bad UX, that statement has two enterprise search platforms standing behind it :)

Your message should transmit that trust. It's how the top advisors and consultants got where they are.

They have the wisdom, and they use it to call something good or bad, worth it or not, from a body of experience that took years to build.

Pascal Bornet argues the same thing in Irreplaceable: AI can simulate human abilities, but those abilities rest on " our individual life experiences, our human emotions" and personalities that technology doesn't have. He's a great follow.

Hard to write into a .skill file

Taste is the closest to replicable, given how much it resembles building a knowledge graph of familiar entities.

Artistry isn't, no matter how clever the prompt. It's more...poetic and can't be systemized.

Judgment needs so much context that it's difficult to build at scale, especially when most of the variables never make it into the system in the first place.

I say this as someone who has automated a lot of his own work. I've built a stack of custom skills that handle research, monitoring, audits, and reporting, and I hand the prototypes to internal teams so they can build the durable version themselves.

I have no interest in being the guy who hoards the expertise...I want to build champion and championship programs with Surfaced.

I also built a search maturity assessment and I refuse to turn it into a gated download. Everyone in growth marketing will tell you to make it a lead magnet, capture the email, run the nurture sequence.

I'd rather people talk to me to find out where they land, because the interesting part was never the score. It's the ten minutes after, when someone says "yeah, but you don't know how our budget cycle works," and they're right, and that changes the answer.

That's the part I won't automate. Not because I can't, but because the conversation is the product.

As AI expands the space of possible outputs, the hard part becomes choosing well: what's valuable, what's feasible, what's worth doing at all.

AI will make you feel like you're perpetually behind. It won't take your job if you remember how much of creating, building, and marketing happens outside the walls of a data center.

Hope you enjoyed.