2026.22: Taste is the moat.
Happy Friday friends, this week from World Cup crazed Toronto!
You may have noticed there was no letter last week. I’ve been all over North America, again, and just couldn't get one out the door.
A friend asked me last week what skill her kid should learn to stay employable. She expected me to say coding. Or prompting. Or some tool with a logo on it.
I said..."teach him to have good taste."
She laughed. Then she realized I wasn't joking.
Here's where my head is at. The most valuable thing you can own in an AI world isn't technical skill, and it sure isn't prompt engineering. It's your judgment. Your taste. The voice that's actually yours. The machine can copy competence all day long. It cannot copy you.
Let me walk through why I believe that.
Let’s break it down.
Signal:
CAN I TRUST YOUR JUDGEMENT
AI is an amplifier, not a replacement. It makes a good editor great and a sloppy one dangerous. The person who wins isn't the one who knows which buttons to push. It's the one who can look at what the machine hands back and say, "no, that's wrong, and here's why."
Curation is the skill now.
Direction is the skill.
Telling good from almost-good, fast.
Which means experience just became the hiring criteria, not a line on the resume. When the routine thinking gets handled by a model, what's left to pay for? Discernment. A point of view. The scar tissue that tells you something is off before you can explain why. Employers will stop asking "can you do the task" and start asking "can I trust your judgment."
Scale:
EXPERIENCE IS THE NEW BAR
That breaks something we never thought to question.
The apprenticeship is gone. For a hundred years, you learned by doing the grunt work. The junior analyst built the boring model. The young lawyer read the boring contracts. That's where taste came from. Reps, on small stakes, for years. The machine does the grunt work now. So how does anyone build judgment without the climb that used to build it? I don't have a clean answer. Neither does anyone else. But pretending the old ladder still works is how we end up with a generation that can prompt and cannot think.
Here's the part nobody wants to hear. Your AI agrees with you. About everything. It's a brilliant, tireless yes-man, and that is its most dangerous feature, not its best one. So argue with it. Make it take the other side. Ask it to tear your idea apart before your client does. Treat its agreement as a smell, not a reward. I don't want to be praised. I never have. I want to be engaged. Point your tools the same way.
And underneath all of it, your voice matters more now, not less. When every post sounds like it rolled off the same assembly line, the human one stands out like a sore thumb, in the best way. Your voice is built from your experience, your values, the things you actually believe at 2am. That's not a feature you can install. It's the one thing that stays scarce while everything else gets cheap.
Deep Dive:
So here's what to do this week...
Pick one thing you make. An email, a deck, a decision. Slow down on the judgment part. Let the machine draft. You decide. Argue with it out loud. And write the one paragraph only you would write.
Snow melts from the edges. The advantage was never in the middle.
Thanks for reading!
What's the one skill you're betting on for the next ten years? I'd love to hear it. Especially if you think I've got this wrong.
The newsletter isn't the conversation. The conversation is the conversation.
See you next Friday.
Best, JT
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