One quick thing Talacko built was an agent that monitored when someone registered interest on their website and then googled to see if they were notable. “That’s how we noticed that Ivan Zhao of Notion had signed up to use our product,” Lee says, name-dropping the CEO of a popular productivity tool. “The agent was kind of acting like a sentry, patrolling our database. That’s obviously something you’d never hire a human to do.”
Right, the humans. In this case, it’s not that a job is getting eliminated or not created. It’s more that an AI-powered person can stretch. As Barnwell from the traffic lights company put it, he’s writing code he wouldn’t have otherwise bothered to write. Two years ago, back when coding was arduous, he’d spent most of his time in the weeds with functions and algorithms. Now he can devote more of himself to research, exploration, and the task generally known as thinking. “You’re building disposable software all the time to help you accomplish stuff,” he says.
Code isn’t precious anymore, and that disposability can feel destabilizing. Lee told me how a year ago they spent three months learning and suffering to meticulously code up an agent, and that now all their work “could probably be written in three days, without our touch.” Lee confessed to feeling a bit bleak and finds himself wondering what’s even worth learning these days.
“What is insane about today,” Talacko adds, “is if a customer emails you with a bug or a feature request, you can literally copy and paste what they wrote into Claude Code, and you’ll have a feature in 15 minutes.”
“So,” I asked, “is your brain, just, not involved?”
He let out a huff and paused to think. “I guess, like, the judgment of whether you should build that feature is what’s most important. It’s far less about being able to build stuff and put slop out into the world and more about being tactical and strategic with what you are choosing to build.”
When building systems becomes this easy, you can run countless experiments. Wander down dark alleys. The penalty of trying a different approach has dropped so low that a single startup can parallel-universe itself into any number of versions before collapsing into one smart, sensible form. When, as some like to say, you can write a startup’s worth of code in a weekend, the work of building a tech company is no longer coding, exactly. So what, then, is the work?
“The consequence,” Lee told me, “is that taste becomes the most important thing. Everything else is an expression of or an implementation of that taste.”
I hesitated, feeling an impossible question take over my mind. Then I blurted it out: How do they define taste? I anticipated an uncomfortable silence.
Lee cracked a smile and said, “Actually we have a whole group chat, to define what taste is.”
We spent a few minutes discussing, but a crisp answer eluded us. After the call ended, an email from Lee appeared in my inbox. It contained a set of links to his favorite readings on taste. Some were posts on X. There was a smart write-up on LinkedIn. But his favorite—and mine, easily—was an essay by the godfather of startups, Paul Graham.