You can't beat AI

Everyone can see what is going on with today’s job market: 

massive layoffs and increasing demand for jobs. And I think we all agree it is because of AI.

For the past few decades, companies have been paying other people for their intelligence, their average intelligence, actually. 

This cost is now being compared to a subscription. A Claude or ChatGPT subscription. Because these AIs are so good on average, at a very low price. And when a service with average quality gets cheaper, production skyrockets. 

So they can produce more:

• More average landing pages  
• More average content  
• More average essays  
• More average emails  
• More average ads  
• More average social posts  
• More average product descriptions  
• More average reports  
• More average newsletters  
• More average code  
• More average presentations  
• More average ideas  
• More average everything  

This is happening while companies used to hire people for each of those tasks, usually an expensive one.

Now they need a prompt. Maybe 30 seconds. Maybe $20/month.

And the output is… fine.

Sometimes Good. 

Sometimes better than the junior person they hired last year.

That’s why junior jobs are simply crashing.

So, companies can now test new ideas at a very low cost, iterating faster than ever. For instance, take my newsletter, Techstory.dev 😁. I built the entire product in a few days just to test it. And it’s “good enough.”

There is no way you will be able to resist it. This is what‘s happening in the world right now. 

Judgment is the new work

When intelligence gets cheap, judgment gets expensive.

Everyone can generate options → Few people can pick.

Everyone can draft → Few people can decide what should exist.

Everyone can summarize → Few people can tell what matters.

Everyone can make a slide → Few people can make the one that closes.

The valuable person is no longer the person who can produce the first version.

The valuable person is the one who can look at 20 versions and say:

• ”This one”
• “This angle”
• “This risk“
• ”This is wrong.”
• “This is not needed“
• “This sounds good, but solves nothing.“
• “This should never be sent. “

That’s taste. And taste is trained by doing the work.

Thousands of reps. Bad calls. Awkward meetings. Failed launches. Clients who didn’t buy. Readers who didn’t care (hi! if it’s you). Bosses who killed the project. Users who clicked the wrong button. 

AI has read about those things. You lived them.

It’s an important gap that will get more and more expensive.

You must find a way to extract your taste and give it to AI.

Because if your taste stays trapped in your head, AI can’t work with it.

Taste and Agency

What does it actually mean?

Taste = Knowing What’s Good

Taste is not just about aesthetics. It is not only about art, design, or having a “good eye.”

Taste is the ability to recognize quality, relevance, and effectiveness.

AI is increasingly good at generating possibilities. It can give you ten headlines, twenty landing page versions, fifty product ideas, or a hundred ways to explain the same thing.

But most of them will be average.

Some will sound good but mean nothing.

Some will look polished but solve the wrong problem.

Some will be clever but useless.

Some will be technically correct but emotionally dead.

Some will be impressive, but not important.

Taste is the ability to look at all of that and say:

“This one.”

“This angle.”

“This is the actual problem.”

“This is too generic.”

“This sounds smart, but nobody cares.”

“This is not ready.”

“This should not exist.”

Think of a movie director.

The actors are talented.

The camera crew is talented.

The editor is talented.

The composer is talented.

But the director’s value comes from repeatedly saying:

“Not that take.”

“This scene is too long.”

“This emotion feels fake.”

“This line doesn’t belong.”

“This is the version.”

That is taste.

taste comes from experience.

Failed projects.

Customer interactions.

Bad launches.

Awkward meetings.

Mistakes.

Intuition built over the years.

Understanding human behavior.

Knowing when people say one thing but mean another.

Knowing when a metric looks good, but the product is still weak.

AI can learn patterns from those experiences, but it has not personally accumulated them.

It has not watched a customer get confused.

It has not sat in a room where nobody buys.

It has not shipped something that looked great internally and failed publicly.

It has not felt the cost of a bad decision.

You have.

That is why your taste matters.

But there is a problem: your taste is mostly invisible.

It lives in your head as instinct. You say things like “this feels off” or “this is not good enough,” but AI cannot work with that unless you explain it.

So you need to extract your taste.

Write down what good looks like.

Save examples.

Explain why something works.

Explain why something fails.

Turn your judgment into prompts, checklists, principles, and feedback.

Because if your taste stays trapped in your head, AI will only give you average work faster.

Agency = Making Things Happen

Agency is the ability to turn judgment into action.

Many people can identify a good idea.

Few people actually do something with it.

Many people can say, “This is a great opportunity.”

Few people start the project.

Many people can say, “Someone should talk to customers.”

Few people send the email.

Many people can say, “We should test this.”

Few people build the prototype.

Agency sounds like:

• “I’ll figure it out.”
• “I’ll ship a prototype this week.”
• “I’ll contact the customer.”
• “I’ll make the decision.”
• “I’ll take responsibility.”
• “I don’t know yet, but I’ll find out.”

Someone with high agency does not wait for perfect instructions.

They move under uncertainty. They make decisions before all the information is available. They ask for help when needed, but they do not wait to be pushed. They create momentum.

Agency is not just about working hard.

A lot of people work hard on things that do not matter.

Agency is ownership. It is the ability to take an unclear situation and move it forward.

In the AI era, this becomes even more important.

Because AI can remove many excuses.

You do not need a full team to test an idea.

You do not need weeks to make a landing page.

You do not need a designer for the first mockup.

You do not need a developer for the first prototype.

You do not need a copywriter for the first draft.

You can start.

And that exposes something.

Some people were not blocked by a lack of resources. They were blocked by a lack of agency.

Why Taste Alone Isn’t Enough

Imagine someone who can immediately spot the best business opportunity.

They know which idea is strongest.

They know which positioning is weak.

They know what customers probably want.

They know what the market is missing.

But they never build it.

They never launch it.

They never talk to customers.

They never take responsibility.

That is taste without agency.

They become an excellent critic.

And critics are useful, but they do not create much leverage unless their judgment turns into action.

Why Agency Alone Isn’t Enough

Now imagine someone who constantly ships things but cannot tell good ideas from bad ones.

They build fast.

They launch fast.

They chase trends fast.

They are always busy.

But they built the wrong product.

They solve unimportant problems.

They optimize things nobody cares about.

They confuse motion with progress.

That is agency without taste.

And AI will make this worse.

Because now people can produce more, faster. More websites. More content. More features. More campaigns. More experiments.

But if the direction is wrong, speed just creates more noise.

The Combination: Taste + Agency

My real point is that AI is making execution cheaper, but that increases the value of two human abilities:

Taste → choosing the right direction.

Agency → making it happen.

A future high-performer might look like this:

“I know which opportunity matters, and I can use AI to execute it quickly.”

Old world:

Designer creates designs.

The developer writes code.

Marketer writes copy.

Analyst creates reports.

New world:

One person with strong taste identifies a real opportunity.

They use AI to generate designs, code, copy, research, and reports.

Then they use agency to refine, launch, test, and iterate.

The bottleneck is no longer production.

The bottleneck becomes:

Choosing wisely.

Acting decisively.

Knowing what matters.

Making it real.

That is why many people summarize the AI era as:

AI generates. Humans judge and decide.

But I would add one more thing:

Humans also have to move.

Because judgment without action becomes commentary.

Action without judgment becomes noise.

The people who combine both will become disproportionately valuable.

They will know what is worth doing.

They will know what good looks like.

They will know how to use AI as leverage.

And they will actually make things happen.

And this is how you can secure your future from the threat of AI

Humanly yours,

Hossein Molavi.