Design taste for builders is mostly the courage to delete, and you can learn it

I am not a designer. I want to say that up front because most writing about taste comes from people who clearly have it, which is useless if you are a founder who can build but whose interfaces come out looking like every other thing shipped this week.

And that is the actual problem in 2026. When everyone can generate a clean landing page in an afternoon, clean stops meaning anything. The baseline got so high and so uniform that "fine" is now invisible. I have looked at a hundred startup pages this year and I could not tell you which company most of them were for. Same hero, same gradient, same three feature cards, same rounded everything. It is competent and it is forgettable, and forgettable is just a slow way to lose.

So taste became a moat, not because design got more important in some abstract way, but because sameness got cheap. The AI gives everyone the same engine. What it cannot give you is the judgment of what to do with it. That judgment is the scarce thing now.

What taste actually is

I used to think taste was knowing how to make things pretty. It is not. The most useful definition I have found is that taste is what you refuse to do. It is restraint. It is the discipline to remove features and elements until the product hurts a little to use, because everything left has to earn its place. A tasteful interface is not the one with the most considered additions. It is the one where someone clearly said no a lot.

That reframe was freeing for a non-designer, because refusal is a skill I can practice without being able to draw. I cannot conjure a beautiful illustration. I can absolutely look at my screen and ask "does this element justify existing," and delete it when the answer is no.

How a non-designer builds it

The way I have been building taste is embarrassingly simple: I look at a lot of things on purpose and I force myself to say why. Not "I like this," that is worthless. Why do I like it. What specifically is doing the work. Is it the spacing, the restraint in the color, the one thing they made big while everything else stayed quiet. I keep a private collection of interfaces that made me feel something and I annotate them. Over months this builds a vocabulary, and once you have the vocabulary you start seeing your own work the way you see other people's.

The second thing: I copy the structure of work I admire, then strip it down to find what mattered. Not to ship the copy, that is slop, but to understand the bones. When you rebuild something good you discover which decisions were load-bearing and which were decoration. That is a faster education than any course.

The third thing, and this is the one that fights the AI-slop default directly: I make myself add one deliberate, specific choice to anything I ship. One thing that is a decision and not a default. A typeface that means something. A color that is mine. One interaction that has a little human craft in it. The generated baseline gives you the boring middle for free. Taste is everything you do to climb out of the middle on purpose.

The trap

The trap is using AI for the parts that need judgment and doing it yourself for the parts that are commodity. It should be the reverse. Let the agent generate the scaffolding, the boring competent version, fast. Then spend your actual attention on the small set of decisions that make it feel like a person built it and cared. The AI gets you to "fine" in minutes. The work is the gap between fine and distinctive, and that gap is entirely judgment, which means it is entirely yours.

I still ship things that look a bit generic. I am being honest. But I can feel my eye getting sharper, and the test is simple: I now wince at stuff I shipped six months ago. That wince is taste arriving. If you never wince at your old work, you are not developing an eye, you are just shipping the default and calling it done.

You do not need to become a designer. You need to look harder, refuse more, and add one true thing. That is learnable, and right now it is one of the few things that actually separates your product from the flood.