Taste Apps

For about forty years the hard part of software was building it. You needed engineers and time and money, and the company that could line up the most of those usually won. Whoever shipped more code, faster, took the market.

That’s ending. What took a team a quarter, one person can now do in an afternoon. None of this makes software free, though, and that’s the part people miss. You still have to get it to people, earn their trust, keep it running, and decide what it should do next. The building isn’t free either: it runs on compute, and compute costs real money. Far less than a room of engineers, but nobody’s handing it out. What actually changed is where the cost lands. It used to sit on a company’s payroll. Now it falls to one person, because for the first time, one person can carry it. A bill that used to need a company shrank to something you can put on your own card.

When the thing everyone competed on stops being scarce, the fight moves to whatever’s left. If anyone can spin up a CRM or a bill-splitter or a scheduling tool, then having built one proves nothing. The question changes. Not whether you can build it, but whether you built the right thing, with the right opinions, the right feel. The scarce thing now is taste.

A taste app is software whose worth comes from the judgment in it. Not the feature list. Not the difficulty, since the difficulty is mostly gone. What it leaves out. What it refuses to do. How it sits in your hand. The maker’s sensibility is the product. You can feel it the way you walk into a room and tell whether someone designed it or just filled it.

A Note on Taste

It’s worth slowing down on the word, because “taste” can sound soft, like an opinion you’re not allowed to argue with. It isn’t soft. Taste is the ability to tell what’s good, and the nerve to act on it before you can prove you’re right.

The best case for taste as a real, payable skill comes from a man who built a career on almost nothing else. Rick Rubin has made some of the most important records of the last forty years, for Johnny Cash, the Beastie Boys, the Chili Peppers, Adele. He also can’t really play an instrument and doesn’t touch the board. On 60 Minutes, Anderson Cooper kept circling it. You don’t play instruments? Barely. You don’t work the soundboard? No. So what are you being paid for? Rubin’s answer: “The confidence that I have in my taste, and my ability to express what I feel, has proven helpful for artists.”

That used to land like a paradox. It’s about to read like a job description. For most of computing’s history the technical ability was the scarce part, and taste was a luxury you got to once the hard engineering was done. Take the cost of the engineering to nothing and you end up standing where Rubin has stood the whole time: the only thing you really bring is knowing what’s good, and the confidence to say so out loud.

The companies that can’t follow

This is a hard spot for the companies that won the last round. Think about Salesforce. Six months ago a five-thousand-person engineering org wasn’t waste, it was strength, the very thing that made you hard to beat. Now a sliver of that headcount can outproduce it, and the rest becomes weight you’re carrying. What counted as a sensible cost has a far shorter shelf life than anyone planned, and what used to be an asset is turning into a liability.

They can probably survive it. But survival has a cost, and people pay most of it. The way a giant learns to move like something small is layoffs, reorgs, and a lot of good people told they’re now overhead. Most of them did nothing wrong. They got good at the job the world asked them to be good at, and then the world quietly changed the job. Calling that progress without naming the pain is a lie, and the pain is real.

This is where the new era gives something back, and not in a greeting-card way. The same collapse in cost that makes a person redundant inside a big company is what lets that person walk out and build something real alone. The thing that took the job also hands over the press. It used to be that losing a seat at a company that size meant hunting for another seat at one just like it. Now one person with taste and a handful of tools can make a product that matters, carry the cost on their own, and answer to no committee.

And that points at the deeper reason the incumbents are stuck. They can shed cost, but they can’t become taste-makers in-house, because taste doesn’t come from a building full of people. It comes from one person, or a few, circling something until it feels right. Two hundred product managers, a roadmap committee, and a quarterly plan grind that instinct flat. The same shape that lets them cut is the shape that can’t make the thing worth making now. So the value doesn’t stay inside the company. It moves to wherever taste can actually live, which is a person.

I’ll own the soft spot, since it’s what makes the rest worth believing. Taste keeps no one out. It doesn’t scale the way code does, you can’t patent it, and somebody sharper can show up next year and do it better. What it does is compound. Every pass makes it surer, and it never separates from the person it belongs to. Being first to a feel nobody else has counts for plenty. That’s a different game than the one the incumbents know how to win, which is most of why they’ll struggle to win it.

Building without spending people

I’ll get personal for a second, because it’s the part I mean most. I have never had the stomach for the kind of building that treats people as line items. I’ve watched companies use people up and file it under strategy, watched steady lives get upended to move a number, and it has always turned my stomach. I admire plenty of what the ruthless builders have made. I just could never be one of them, and for a long time I took that to mean I wasn’t cut out to build anything big.

It turns out that wasn’t a flaw in me. It was a feature of the old machine. Building at scale used to mean getting it out of people, and the ones who could do that without losing sleep were the ones who got to build. That part is ending. I can run as hard as I want now, and the thing taking the strain is compute, not a person with a family and a limit. I get to want a lot and not spend anyone to get it. That’s the first time in my life the ambition and the conscience have pointed the same way.

Licorice

Here’s what’s easy to forget: a taste app isn’t supposed to be for everyone. The moment you file down the opinions to win the undecided, you lose the people who came for the opinions. It’s a bit like licorice. Plenty of people can’t stand it. The ones who love it really love it, and those are the people you build for. A lot of folks will look at something with strong opinions and call it crazy, or shrug and move on. That isn’t failure. That’s the sort doing its work. They’re telling you, free of charge, that they were never going to be yours.

I know the feeling from the fan’s side. I’ve loved a band my whole life that plenty of people just don’t hear, and the not-hearing never took anything from me, because for those of us who did, it was the whole world. That’s what I’m reaching for. Not software people tolerate. Something a certain kind of person feels the way I feel about the music I’d never want to live without.

If that’s you, you already know.