Rick Rubin: Taste Matters

Shaan Puri believes AI is fundamentally changing how people can participate in creative and technical fields by decoupling skill from taste. He sees this as democratizing access to creation—allowing anyone with good taste and vision to build things that previously required years of technical expertise.

Key Points:

• Skill vs. Taste Decoupling:

  • Previously, you needed both skill (technical knowledge, tools mastery) and taste (knowing what's cool, what works)
  • AI has decoupled these—now you just need taste
  • If you have both, you'll make better things, but taste alone gets you in the game

• "Vibe Coding" for Everything:

  • You describe roughly what you want, the AI makes it, you refine by feel
  • Like ordering at a restaurant—the chef keeps making until you get what you want
  • Works for code, music, and increasingly everything else
  • You don't need to know technical terms (keys, BPM, instruments)—just describe the end result

• Personal Software Revolution:

  • All software today is built centrally to appeal to everyone
  • Now you can create highly personalized software for your exact situation
  • Not just "Sam who likes business biographies" but "Sam going through these specific challenges right now"
  • Software that didn't need to exist before can now exist for niche use cases

• Massive Opportunity Expansion:

  • Yes, competition increased (more players in the game)
  • But the opportunity set expanded way more (50x more chairs in musical chairs)
  • Every product in every category is up for grabs
  • Plus entirely new categories that AI enables
  • The multiplier on ways to win outweighs the increased competition

• The Right Mental Frame:

  • Wrong approach: Try to become top 1-10% in AI skills
  • Right approach: Get to 50th percentile in AI and multiply it against your existing top 10% skills
  • Don't compete with 22-year-olds or technical geniuses spending 24/7 on this
  • Just get "dangerous enough" where AI multiplies what you already know

• Real-World Impact:

  • Billion-dollar companies doubling profit margins with basic AI implementation
  • Improvements in customer support, developer productivity, replacing junior programmers
  • Every company needs "as many as you can have" AI-capable people

• Personal Use Cases:

  • Creating custom intro music for his high school basketball team
  • Making personalized workout playlists instead of listening to mainstream music
  • Building things for use cases that wouldn't justify hiring someone, but take seconds with AI