Vamsee Jasti

There’s a lot of discussion right now about taste (a good 20 years before ChatGPT got announced) and agency in the age of AI. How do you develop taste. How do you maintain agency when the tools can do so much. These are real questions. But I think they skip over something more basic: do you have a bar for what great looks like, and do you actually hold yourself to it? Since anyone can now get to the 90th percentile. The last 10% is all that’s left.

I notice this in my own work. AI has made it shockingly easy to get to “very good.” I can draft something in minutes (except, maybe great at making slides) that would have taken me hours. The grammar is clean. The structure is logical. It’s mostly right. It reads fine. And that’s exactly the problem — it reads fine. It doesn’t read like me. It doesn’t have the thing that made it worth writing in the first place.

The temptation is to let it go. Ship it. Post it. Send it. It’s good enough. Nobody will complain. But I know when something I’ve put out into the world cleared my bar and when it didn’t. And that feeling — the quiet knowledge that you let a A-minus out the door because it was easy — accumulates.

What I keep coming back to is that the time I saved should go somewhere. And for me, it goes into the part I actually care about — the judgment, the point of view, the iteration that lets me stand on top of this giant called AI, the last 10% percent where adequate becomes something that’s uniquely me.

I don’t have a framework for this. It’s more of a gut check. When I get the tokens to flow as a response to my prompt, before I hit publish, before I send the doc, I ask myself: would I put my name on this if people knew how it was made? Not because using AI is something to hide — but because the question forces me to confront whether I actually shaped the output into something that reflects me, my thinking, respects the people receiving it or whether I just let the machine fill the page.

I think standards have always mattered. They’ve just never been this easy to let go for them.