Build 'Taste' for the critics but 'Care' for the fans.
There are a lot of folks out there tell you that what matters now is 'taste'. Some loosely defined term that boils down to "know if the output is slop or not slop". While it is probably a useful skill, I'd argue the thing that will ultimately determine if your AI assisted software is how much you care.
Lenny Rachitsky
When I think about the origins of the term 'taste' I think about that often quoted speech by Ira Glass:
He uses the word 'taste' within the video as a way to help encourage people to stick to things long before they can produce things to the quality they desire. I think in this form 'taste' means something pure.
More than a decade later I think the intention has been twisted in it's recent usage. Taste is no longer about you and your vision for something, it's about meeting a bar of 'quality' set out by someone else. If it wasn't you could never hire for or judge someone on their ability to have 'taste'.
Okay so why the two terms. Why don't we just say that's 'Taste'?
This is why. Loved by critics, hated by players.
Or this. Hated by critics, loved by viewers.
Or the countless others where the folks who pride themselves on 'knowing if things are good' differ wildly in opinion to the masses. They often live in bubbles, driven by incentives that are absent outside those bubbles.
This matters because your customer is probably in the second category. Those are the people who won't just use your thing once to write up a review, they're the folks that will use it every day.
The secret to impressing them is to care about them a lot. Not to care about what they might say in a review but to care about solving their problems in a way that matters to them.
They probably won't care about your tech stack. If your product works they're probably pretty forgiving with design. They certainly don't care if you used Claude or Codex.
This strange divide exists in all software, even B2B SaaS apps and strange niche software. So many of today's leading products seem odd and clunky to the unfamiliar but have cemented themselves because they work and work well.
I don't know if Ira Glass meant 'taste' for the 'taste makers' but when I listen to that talk I think he meant: continue to work at it because you care about realizing your vision, because sometimes you can venture paste done a little more towards perfect.