When generation gets cheap, craft becomes judgment. Raj Nandan Sharma, writing on his blog, puts it bluntly:

Before AI, mediocre work often reflected a lack of time, resources, or execution skill. Today mediocre work often means something else: the person stopped at the first acceptable draft. That is the economic shift AI introduces. It compresses the cost of first drafts, which means the value moves downstream… In other words, the scarce skill is not generation. It is refusal.

Refusal—knowing what to throw out and why—is what’s scarce in a world where anyone can generate ten competent drafts before lunch.

But Sharma doesn’t stop there. He warns that elevating taste alone can quietly corner humans into an end-of-pipeline selector role:

There is a strong version of the “taste matters” argument that quietly pushes humans into a narrow role. In that version, AI generates many outputs and the human stands at the end of the pipeline selecting the best one. That is a useful role, but it is also too small… The warning is not that taste has no value. It does. The warning is that taste without authorship, stake, or construction can become a narrow and eventually fragile role.

The warning Sharma adds is the part the “taste is the moat” conversation tends to skip. Refusal without authorship is still selector work, and selector work has a ceiling. The durable position pairs refined taste with authorship—owning what ships and the stake for getting it wrong.