Steven Tyler once attached rubber bands from his jeans to his boots so they wouldn't ride up when he sat down.

Not because anyone asked him to. Not because fans would notice. Because it bothered him. Because his style mattered to him at a level most people would call obsessive—and he'd call necessary.

He did this in high school. Before Aerosmith. Before the fame, the hits, the millions. He was already the kind of person who couldn't let a detail slide. And that instinct—that refusal to accept "good enough"—is what built one of the greatest rock careers in history.

"My perfectionism and my busting everyone's chops is what got this band to where it is today," Tyler told 60 Minutes. "In the end, I get a really good song and in the end, I get the hits."

Now. What does Steven Tyler's wardrobe have to do with AI?

Everything.

The Age of Unlimited Execution

Right now, you can build almost anything. AI agents will write your code, design your interfaces, generate your content, analyze your data, and assemble your automations. The cost of execution has collapsed to near zero. The speed is staggering.

But here's the problem nobody talks about.

When everyone has the same godlike power to create, what separates the extraordinary from the mediocre?

Not the tools. Everyone has access to the same tools.

Not the speed. AI is fast for everyone.

The difference is whether you know what good looks like.

Three Things That Matter

I've been thinking about this for a while, and I believe it comes down to three traits. They build on each other like layers. You can't skip one.

Affinity.

Affinity is the starting point. It's the deep pull toward quality—the inability to ignore when something is off. You notice the font that doesn't feel right. You hear the note that's slightly flat. You feel the fabric and know it's cheap before you check the label.

Some people have this. Some people don't. And it's not about being snobby or pretentious. It's about caring. Jony Ive, who shaped every product Apple made for two decades, distilled his entire design philosophy into two words: "Just care."

That's affinity. You care enough to notice.

Style.

If affinity is noticing, style is choosing. It's the consistent expression of what you value. Your particular way of seeing the world, applied to everything you create.

Style is Tyler choosing rock and committing to it with every fiber of his being—down to the boots. Style is why two designers given the same brief produce different work, and both can be excellent. It reflects your values, not just your preferences.

The dangerous thing isn't having a style people disagree with. The dangerous thing is having no style at all. That's like having no opinion about things that matter.

Taste.

Taste is where affinity and style converge into judgment. It's the trained ability to look at something and know—not just that it works, but why it works. And more important, to feel when something is 90 percent right but missing the crucial 10 percent that makes it exceptional.

Steve Jobs put it in 1995: "The only problem with Microsoft is they just have no taste. They have absolutely no taste. And I don't mean that in a small way, I mean it in a big way."

Harsh? Yes. But Jobs wasn't talking about aesthetics alone. He was talking about the entire philosophy of how you build things. He was talking about caring so deeply that you won't use plywood on the back of a cabinet—even though nobody will ever see it.

That's taste. The commitment to excellence even where it's invisible.

The Multiplication Thesis

Here's where this connects to AI and why it matters more than ever.

AI is a force multiplier. It amplifies whatever you bring to it.

If you bring 25 years of cultivated judgment—years of learning what works, what fails, what delights users, what frustrates them—AI takes that and produces excellence at scale. You write better prompts because you understand the problem deeply. You recognize when AI output is 80 percent right but missing the soul. You know when to accept and when to push back. You feel it.

But if you bring nothing—no affinity, no style, no taste—AI still multiplies. It multiplies zero. And zero times anything is still zero. You get mediocrity at scale. Fast, confident, polished mediocrity.

The gap between professionals isn't narrowing because of AI. It's widening. Because the person with deep experience and refined taste now operates at a speed that was impossible two years ago—while the person without it produces more of what wasn't good enough to begin with.

What This Looks Like in Practice

When I sit with an AI agent and review what it's built, the experience isn't passive. It's a conversation between what the AI produced and what I know should exist.

I look at an interface and feel whether the hierarchy is right. I read generated copy and sense whether it sounds like the brand or like a machine pretending. I examine a workflow and know—from years of watching users struggle with bad ones—where the friction will be before anyone tests it.

The system prompt you write, the specifications you craft, the feedback you give when AI produces its first draft—all of that is taste in action. Your prompt is the deciding factor between a valid response and a great response. Between something that technically works and something people love.

The process isn't mystical. It's practical. It's the accumulated residue of thousands of decisions made over years of work.

The Industry Is Catching On

That conviction isn't mine alone. It's becoming the central conversation in tech.

Andrej Karpathy—co-founder of OpenAI, former AI leader at Tesla—coined the term "vibe coding" in 2025 to describe the new way humans guide AI to produce code. By early 2026, he'd already retired the term in favor of something more precise: "agentic engineering." His emphasis: orchestration, oversight, and the art of directing agents. Not just vibes. Judgment.

Linas Beliunas, fintech writer and head of content strategy at Oscilar, put it in a viral post: "The biggest lesson from the vibe-coding era is that the real bottleneck was never coding—it was creativity and taste."

David Hoang, author of the Proof of Concept newsletter, compared AI orchestration to Real-Time Strategy games. "The orchestrator doesn't need to micromanage every step. You operate at a higher altitude." The best commanders aren't the ones who build the most units. They're the ones who know where to deploy them.

The whole industry is converging on the same insight: execution is no longer the bottleneck. Taste is.

An Honest Word for Those Starting Out

I need to address something, and I want to be direct about it.

If you're early in your career—if you don't yet have years of accumulated judgment—this might sound discouraging. Like the game is rigged for people with decades of experience.

It's not. But I won't pretend there's a shortcut.

Ira Glass, the creator of This American Life, described this tension better than anyone: "All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it's just not that good...your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer."

The gap between your taste and your ability is painful. But it's also proof that you're on the right path. If you can tell that something isn't good enough, you already have the most important ingredient. The skills will catch up—if you put in the work.

AI doesn't skip this step. It rewards it. The more experience you feed into the multiplication, the more powerful the result becomes. Start building. Start caring. The compound effect is real.

The Signature You Can't Fake

After 25 years of building software, designing interfaces, and working with clients ranging from startups to enterprises—the one skill that never became obsolete was the ability to look at something and know.

Know whether it's right. Know whether it serves the user. Know whether it has that invisible quality that makes people come back.

Tools change. Languages change. Frameworks come and go. But taste compounds. Every project, every failure, every moment where you spotted what others missed—it all accumulates into something AI can amplify but never replace.

In the age of AI agents, your taste is your signature. It's the one thing that can't be downloaded, can't be prompted, and can't be faked.

The question isn't whether AI will change how you work. It already has.

The question is: What are you giving it to multiply?