What matters in the age of AI is taste
the case for why a curated personal knowledge base has never mattered more
The more I use AI, the more I realize ignoring its creative potential is like dismissing the ‘90s internet as a porn delivery system.
At first, I saw using AI as a binary choice between soulless efficiency or becoming a luddite and preserving your authentic human creativity.
Over the last few months, Claude has become my dream creative partner, and I haven’t lost my soul. This broke my brain a little bit.
Curiosity is a better compass than cynicism—it shifts from defending your territory to exploring what's possible (this reframe — from Holly Herndon, was a big unlock for me).
Imagine starting every project with the clay of humanity's accumulated knowledge at your fingertips, waiting for you to mold it to your liking?
AI is powerful but taste-blind. It can make anything but it has no idea what's actually worth making.
But AI + your taste? That's the game-changer.
The more AI can execute, the more your eye for what's interesting – your ability to discern and curate what matters and why – becomes everything.
But if you don’t have a home for the references, quotes, notes, and highlights that moved you—what are you giving AI to work with?
All that is to say: A curated personal knowledge base has never mattered more. Not just to remember what inspires you, but to teach AI to see through your eyes.
AI is only as good as the context you give it
One of the misconceptions about AI is that it reduces the need for expertise. The opposite is true.
LLMs operate in a vast space of linguistic possibility: every word you input shapes what comes next. Ask it to write about walking through a city and you’ll get a generic response. But ask it to explore urban wandering in the style of Walter Benjamin's flâneur, with inspiration from Joan Didion’s precise observations and the result is a million times better.
Here's where things get interesting: Two years ago, you could only feed models ~1,500 words of context. Today, context windows can absorb upwards of 1.5 million words. Claude may have read the entire Internet, but it doesn’t know where you’re coming from—until now.
This is where curation becomes invaluable. If you’ve collected ideas from beyond the reach of the Internet’s dopamine-drip algorithms—Whole Earth Catalog archives, early web1.0 manifestos, ancient religious texts, that one line your grandpa used to always say—that becomes incredible context to tune AI to your eye.
All that is to say: AI can't generate good taste, but it can help you transform the raw material of your taste into something beautiful.
Contexts worth cultivating
If context is everything, how do you cultivate contexts worth having?
First, you need to cultivate a deeper relationship with your gut. The more our world becomes measurable and quantifiable, the more we need spaces that preserve what can't be measured—the hunches we can't explain, the patterns we feel but can't prove. A jazz musician knows when to break rules in ways no theory explains. A good copywriter can feel what words will land without having a single data point to prove it. Taste isn't some mysterious gift bestowed at birth—it's simply what happens when you pay close attention to what moves you.
Second, by not letting algorithms decide what deserves your attention. If you want to feel creatively and intellectually alive, stop mindlessly consuming the internet and start mindfully curating it. You need a space away from social media's compulsive rhythm, where your ideas can grow at their own pace.
And lastly, this part’s key – you have to forget everything you think about how to organize your notes. Folders are fine for tax documents, but they’re a dumb way to organize ideas. Your job isn't to arrange everything into neat categories—it's to create meaningful contexts.
That means not organizing by what something is (topics like 'productivity' or ‘technology’) but by the context you’ll be in when you need it—'references for my next essay,' 'inspiration for client work’, or half-baked ideas you’re still marinating on, like ‘do what you love, but solve for distribution’. Not only does this match how you’ll actually want to use the information, it makes it incredibly easy to feed your AI the right context.
I know this all sounds pretty abstract. Let me bring it to life with two examples so you can see the difference context makes.
The examples
Let’s say you’re a writer exploring the idea that mistakes and imperfection are a good thing—something Harrison Moore is actually exploring.
You could ask ChatGPT to help you draft something from scratch, or you could feed it the curated references you've been gathering. Notice the difference when you bring context into the mix.
Now let’s assume Sublime is hiring a Head of Growth. I could prompt ChatGPT to write a job description. Or I could feed it this collection of great job descriptions I've been curating on Sublime (it’s public!)—even with minimal context, the difference is huge.
The examples are endless, but you get the point. Imagine having curated collections for phrases you found particularly resonant, marketing messages that actually got you to click, about pages that made you feel something, internal memos that were well-crafted — each ready to feed as context when you are ready to write your own.
A call to curate
Being salesy makes me extremely uncomfortable, but I’m just gonna say it: if you made it this far and are not yet on Sublime, I genuinely think it’s the perfect tool to curate your personal knowledge library.
We’re in private beta for one more month (public launch coming soon!), so this is your chance to lock Sublime Premium for just $50/year or a one-time $300 lifetime tier before we increase prices at launch.
But it doesn’t have to be Sublime. It can be Apple Notes or that Moleskine notebook you bought last year for all it’s worth. Just commit to the practice.
When you invest in building your own curated knowledge base, you’ll create work that is better, that feels more you. That’s what this is about—giving you the reins so AI works with your taste, not against it.
Because the secret sauce is never the tech—it’s you.
P.S. Check out this workshop recording and slides where I walk through how I use Sublime to build a knowledge library for creative work. More than 700 people joined and many said it transformed their relationship to information and the internet.
Let’s talk about it
Has AI changed how you think about your own creative process?
How are you feeling about AI these days? Anxious? Excited? Both?
Got any cool weird use cases for AI? Share in the comments!
Does any of this make sense? What questions do you have?
I love the second half of the prompt that you gave Claude to build up exactly the tone of voice you're looking for, I'm gonna give that a try :)
A few use cases I've enjoyed - using the audio mode to practice language learning, crafting personalised applications to join a co-living collective (it's just like resume writing!), and a guilty pleasure ⋱ giving AI a play-by-play of some events (interpersonal issues) happening in my life, and getting it to speculate what will happen if x did what, y didn't do what, etc. 😜
Every carefully tended knowledge garden is a fingerprint of consciousness: A unique archipelago of interests, insights and inspirations that could never be replicated, even by the most sophisticated AI.
By thoughtfully collecting and connecting the ideas that move us, we not only create an invaluable external memory system (which can be great for AI), but we also cultivate a powerful magnet-filter to find other interesting minds as well as a deeper appreciation for how our individual way of seeing and understanding is irrevocably unique.