Taste is the moat

As AI collapsed the cost of building, tech X needed a story about what still separates winners, and it settled on taste: the ability to choose, curate, cut, and know when something is actually good. The phrase circulated across 2024–2026 in essays, investor threads, and founder bios until it became ambient - the exact coiner is unattributed, which is fitting for a phrase about curation rather than creation.

It functions as both a serious strategy claim (models commoditize execution, so differentiation migrates to judgment) and a self-soothing mantra (the person whose job was execution would prefer that taste be the moat). Both uses are correct, often simultaneously, often in the same tweet.

In the field it appears wherever an SF conversation approaches the question of what humans are still for. The engineer ships; the tasteful founder decides what ships. The moat, allegedly, is the second one.