🎟️ I walked past 10ish startup booths at Datadog's DASH 2026 last week. By the eighth one, I could basically predict the exact landing page before I got to it.
Same centered hero. Same two big gradient buttons. Same rounded cards with the same soft shadow. Same clean sans-serif font (iykyk). Same dark mode, same single accent color.
I could immediately tell that almost all of these products were built heavily with Claude Code or OpenAI's Codex. I use these tools every single day, so I can spot it the moment I see it. And don't get me wrong, these are super talented people shipping insanely fast. The velocity is real.
One of my managers put me onto a line she heard on Lenny's Newsletter this week: "AI has no taste." Walking that floor at DASH, it clicked.
Velocity !== taste. AI is REALLY good at giving you the "average" answer. The safe layout. The default component. The thing 10,000 repos did. You ask it to build a landing page and it builds you THE landing page, basically the average of everything it ever scraped on the internet.
And that's the trap. When everybody builds from the same model, everybody ships the same product. A product that looks like every other product is a product nobody remembers, I can guarantee it.
And to be clear, I do think it's totally fine for your actual codebase to lack taste. Code has a target: optimal complexity, the simplest thing that solves the problem, and once you hit both, you're done. Design and product though? They have different targets. There's no "optimal" accent color or "optimal" feature. That's where the taste lives, the SPICE: knowing which idea is even worth building (most aren't), killing that default gradient, making the one weird, opinionated call the model would never suggest on its own. That part you still can't automate (at least for now 😭).
So maybe the new senior engineering skill isn't just building fast. We can honestly all build fast now. It's being the one with the eye, for product and design, to spot the median answer and say: nope, not that one.
Genuinely curious where you land: is "taste" the real moat now? Or does good code have taste too, and I'm drawing the line in the wrong place? 🧛
P.S. Evidence this photo wasn't AI-generated: I'm caught mid-sentence asking the photographer to take it in landscape instead. 📸
Related: Building the eye to spot the default answer and steer against it is exactly what I coach, whether you're an engineer or a product manager. More here: alextong.me/services →
