The Taste Premium

AI can build your deck in 10 minutes. You already know this doesn't feel like an advantage.

Because everyone else can build it in 10 minutes too.

1839... France.

Louis Daguerre patents a process that lets anyone capture a human face. Portrait painters, who'd spent decades mastering light and shadow, watched a $0.50 photograph do in minutes what took them weeks. The panic was real.

But portrait painting didn't die.

It split. Commodity portraits went to daguerreotypes. Anyone with a camera could make a face. Artistic interpretation, the kind where the painter saw what the subject couldn't see about themselves, commanded $500 or more. The cheaper the photograph got, the more the painter's judgment was worth.

Execution became the commodity. Taste became the constraint.

The structural constraint shifted. Before 1839, the bottleneck was skill: could you render a likeness at all? After 1839, the bottleneck was judgment: could you see what was worth rendering, and how?

Walk or Optimize asked which action moves the constraint. Here, the constraint moved on its own. Production costs collapsed and the ceiling shifted from "can you make it" to "should you make it."

The people who'll own the next decade aren't the fastest producers. They're the ones who know which artifact is worth producing. That's the root node now.

You're making this bet whether you see it or not. Every hour spent getting faster at production is an hour not spent sharpening judgment about what to produce.

The 10-minute operating model is worthless if you're modeling the wrong thing.

Go deeper: The Momentum Engine