Historically, the design tool has shaped the outcome of most digital products. When Dreamweaver or Fireworks were the only ways to build websites, the available technology constrained possibilities, resulting in many table-based pages. You can’t expect to have an oil painting using watercolor pencils.
Tools biased what could be made, and skills determined who could make it. If you could build something, people assumed you knew what to build, and consequently what was worth building.
This assumption is no longer valid. The ability to design digital products is not a matter of technical skills alone nowadays. LLMs can make design and development tools accessible to a new range of people eager to build.
These LLMs are smart, and more and more, they’re accurately responding to users’ prompts. But taste is not the same as correctness. At this point, taste is exposed as decisions, intuition, and judgment, not vibes.
In a world where anyone can cheaply generate anything, taste defines what makes a product memorable and beyond the average. In other words, taste is understood as the ability to resist the defaults of LLM models.
Next time, when using Claude Code or Cursor, ask yourself: did you choose this, or did the model?