I vaguely recall an old HN post in which someone asked roughly "Senior devs, what is your advice to younger devs?" What struck me most among the many responses was an observation that almost none of the advice was deeply technical. Nobody recommended what programming language to learn or dev tool to use. This was pre-LLMs, when devs actually had to write code themselves, but even then, senior devs saw a bigger picture.

A similar pattern applies in mathematics. We grow up thinking math is about computing integrals and software development is about implementing algorithms. But leading mathematicians think bigger. The author suggests that while AI can calculate integrals or logically test thousands of lemmas in a few hours, mathematicians still have to develop intuition for what problems to tackle next, and for large problems, what hard parts to focus on. I wouldn't call it taste - intuition can still end up wrong.