The Myth of 'Taste': Why Experience Matters More Than Instinct in Software Development

The tech industry loves to talk about "taste" as if it's some mystical quality that separates the great developers from the merely competent ones. You've probably seen the tweets: "In the age of AI, taste is the ultimate differentiator." It sounds profound, doesn't it? Like there's some secret sauce that the best engineers are born with, something AI will never replicate.

But here's what's been bothering me about this narrative: when people say "taste," what they actually mean is experience.

Think about it. That gut feeling you get when reviewing code? That instinct about whether a technical decision will cause problems down the line? That sense that something's off with a team's structure before you can even articulate why? That's not magic. It's pattern recognition built up over years of doing the work, making mistakes, and learning from them.

I have what people might call "great taste" in engineering management. I can watch a manager handle a difficult conversation and immediately sense whether they nailed it or made it worse. I can look at a team's structure and feel something's off before I can explain what. I can review a technical decision and know it's going to cause problems in three months.

But I wasn't born with management instincts. I've spent years managing teams, having hundreds of 1:1s, navigating hard conversations, conducting performance reviews, and watching projects succeed or fail. My "taste" for management is just pattern recognition from lived experience.

The problem with calling it "taste" instead of "experience" is that it makes a learnable skill sound like a gift. Taste implies you either have it or you don't. It's binary. You're born with good taste, or you're not.

Now picture a junior developer who's been coding for just one year. They review pull requests and sometimes aren't sure if the code is actually good. They hear "taste is what matters in the AI era" and think... well, shit. I don't have that. And the way everyone talks about it, it sounds like something you either have or you don't. Like the game was decided before they even started playing.

I know that feeling intimately. When I was junior, I'd review PRs myself and genuinely have no idea if the code was good. I'd read through it and think "this... seems fine?" I hadn't lived through enough production incidents to recognize what "this will break at scale" actually looks like. I hadn't read enough good code to spot bad code by feel.

Now, after years (16!) of this, I can look at a PR and something just catches. That thing in your gut — something's wrong here, I'm not sure what, but there's definitely something off.

The thing is, "you need taste" tells the wrong story to a junior engineer, while "you need reps" tells them to keep showing up, and you'll get there.

I've written before about what actually makes someone senior: the ability to take something ambiguous and make it concrete. You build that by getting thrown into ambiguous situations over and over until you learn to navigate them. The first time, you'll probably fail. The tenth time, you'll get it. The hundredth time, your brain won't even spend energy on it.

So if you're early in your career and this "taste" talk is making you feel behind: show up, and keep doing the work. Review PRs you don't fully understand yet, ship the features, break stuff (not intentionally, I hope). The taste will come, as it usually does.

And if someone tells you that you either have it or you don't, they've probably just forgotten how many reps it took them to get theirs.

Because here's the truth: there's nothing magical about having good taste in software development. It's just experience wearing a fancier name. And experience? That's something you can absolutely build, one line of code, one code review, one production incident at a time.

The next time you hear someone talk about the importance of "taste" in the AI era, remember: they're really talking about the thousands of hours they've spent wrestling with real problems, making real mistakes, and learning from them. That's not something you're born with — it's something you earn.

And that's good news for all of us still building our way there.