Taste' is the new 10x. Senior devs who can't curate AI output are cooked.

Source: Dev.to

Writing code is easily done, but identifying the code that ought to be available is what’s difficult nowadays.

Many experienced engineers are having a conversation regarding the capability of “taste” to be the most crucial ability of the AI age. “Taste” here doesn’t refer to fashion. Instead, it’s about judgment—being able to assess AI output, understand precisely what’s inappropriate about it, and spot the kind of technical debt that could accumulate before it’s pushed through.

Why This Matters Right Now

Junior‑level AI virtually generates code for free. You can develop a feature instantly that would have needed an entire day to build. But being functional and being ready to ship are not equivalent.

The space between those two terms is where skilled engineers show their real value—or reveal that they have been slacking off.

Taste Is Not Vibes

I am referring to taste as the ability to distinguish code that needs to be written. After two decades of experience, here’s what I’ve learned about this concept. It isn’t some cryptic, elusive instinct; it’s pattern recognition that develops as you observe programs succeed and fail over years.

• Knowing that a 200‑line abstraction will save you now but cost you in six months.
• Recognizing when AI output follows the “happy path” but ignores every edge case your users will hit.
• Feeling the friction in an API surface before anyone files a bug.

There is an ongoing debate: is good taste enough, or should it be combined with solid architecture knowledge? In my opinion, good taste without architecture knowledge is mere personal preference, while architecture knowledge without good taste leads to unnecessary complexity. You need both. However, there is a lack of good taste right now because no one is educating for it.

The Role Shift Nobody Prepared For

Earlier, senior developers were valued because they could build things quickly and well. Now AI builds things quickly. The “well” part depends entirely on you.

Your role is more similar to a film director than a construction worker. You’re inspecting, selecting, and altering. You will have to reject ≈ 80 % of automatically generated content and understand the reason behind each rejection. This skill is completely different from writing code independently.

If your only advantage is typing speed and syntax knowledge, you are already in distress. Those were never senior skills—it’s just that the industry allowed some people to think that way. 🫠

How You Build Taste

You can’t read a book about it. You build taste by shipping things, watching them break, and developing strong opinions about why.

• Review more code than you write, especially code that’s been in production for a year.
• Study systems that have aged well. Ask what decisions made them resilient.
• When AI gives you output, don’t accept it—interrogate it. What would you change? Why?

The engineers I respect most can look at a PR and say “this works but it’s wrong” and then articulate the reason in one sentence. That’s taste: specific, defensible, and earned. 🎯

The Uncomfortable Truth

Some senior engineers will struggle here—not because they lack knowledge, but because they never developed the editorial instinct. They were builders, not curators, and the industry rewarded building for two decades.

That era is ending. The 10× engineer of 2025 isn’t writing 10× more code; they’re preventing 10× more bad code from shipping.

Do you think “taste” is a real, trainable skill—or is it just gatekeeping dressed up in a new outfit?