Whatever model you're using right now is good enough. The question isn't capability anymore. It's taste. Capability has been commoditizing for eighteen months. The benchmarks plateaued in the territory where the difference stops mattering for most work. The model is no longer the lever. Watch what the labs are shipping right now and notice the same thing from two directions. Anthropic shipped Claude design. Identity, typography, layout, voice, the editorial spine the whole product runs on. The brand has a point of view and they're letting it carry the surface. OpenAI shipped pets. Floating overlay. /pet command. Custom personality presets. The brand is leaning into character, presence, attachment. Don't read these against each other. Read them together. Both labs are reaching for the same lever at the same time, in different registers. Both are admitting taste is now load-bearing. Two flavors of the same lever Editorial taste fits a power-user surface. Rigorous. Stable. A design system signals reliability. Character taste fits a wider surface. Warm. Present. Pets signal companionship. Neither is "better." They're aimed at different rooms. Picking which room you're in, and refusing to be a generic version of all rooms, is the work. What this means for the rest of us If the labs are now competing on taste, the same thing is happening one layer down. To everyone using them. When AI gives you all the tools, your taste is the differentiator. To some extent. Craft, distribution, relationships still matter. But the lever that just rotated for the labs is rotating for the rest of us too. The model can't tell you what to make. Your judgment about what to do with all of it can. The takeaway The model is good enough now. The next leverage point isn't more capability. It's the judgment to use it well. Taste is the lever. For them. For us. Full breakdown. The good-enough plateau, the two registers of taste, and what it means for makers, all live here: https://aris-space.com/documents/thoughts-and-scribbles/the-taste-transition

After watching the Flagler workshop and reading the companion: Vote below, then tell us in the comments: where did you land on the PhD thought experiment?

After reading the full history of thinking machines: Vote below, then tell us in the comments: which part of the timeline surprised you the most?

This course set me up with the knowledge. One of my clients is picking up 10 seats of Claude enterprise and I’ll be leading the team on how to get set up correctly for the long term. Cheers. Let’s hope this is just the beginning!

Here's how we build new pages for client's now. Takes about 25% less time. First: an interview. We get the client on a call, follow a structured intake, get everything we need. Claude ingests the transcript and maps the requirements — buyer, intent, conversion action, messaging priorities. That's the foundation. Then Cash, our copywriter agent, writes the copy. Then Ruby, our front-end designer, takes the copy and the client's identity system and builds a clean HTML/CSS mockup. We hand it to the client. They give us feedback. We collect assets — photos, logos, screenshots. Then Cody. Cody has access to the Elementor JSON templates our human designer originally built for this client's site. He reads the approved HTML. He generates a new JSON file in the same structure — same design system, same component logic, same brand patterns. We import that JSON into Elementor. The page is 90% built. The humans still do the review. The humans built the original templates. The humans ran the interview. But the production time? It collapsed. Jake's folder system didn't replace the agency. It restructured where the human work actually lives.