Independent reference · Updated 28 August 2026 · English

Not “I like it”

Taste

Taste is vocabulary plus consequence. If you cannot say the lie — porcelain, spa voice, template sidebar — you only have a preference. Preferences do not survive a pipeline.

Make it inspectable

A death log is taste you can hand to a junior or an agent. “We don’t do rim light on this brand” is a sentence. “It didn’t feel right” is weather. Weather does not encode.

Taste under volume

The job used to be finding a needle. Now it is refusing a haystack of competent needles. Fatigue looks like lowering the cut. Dailies exist so fatigue does not become the brand.

Where taste is trained

Outside the generator. Work you did not prompt: rooms, hours, films, products you would sign. If the only pictures you see are model averages, your taste will become those averages with better grammar.

FAQ

Can you teach taste?

You can teach vocabulary and a ritual of killing. You cannot download someone else’s eye. Hire for the eye, train the ritual.