He says that taste doesn't matter and it hasn't in the past. However, in an era of "extruded code product" (by analogy to https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ExtrudedBookProd... ) automatically generated by the truckload at negligible cost, the differentiator for software developers will necessarily be the ability to create a product that doesn't reek of extruded code product, i.e. the things like quality that he labels taste.

(Whether any one reading this, myself included, survives in the industry long enough to reach the other side of that transition is a different question.)

[EDIT] The reason I use books as an example is that 4.2 million books were published in 2025 (https://ideas.bkconnection.com/10-awful-truths-about-publish...); 3.5m self published (with most likely LLM assisted or wholly generated) and the remainder traditionally published. (That's ~9,600 new self-published books a day.) Who actually still sells enough copies to make money in this paradigm and why offers hints as to where the software industry is likely headed.