Taste + AI = Impact
Simplicity is the hardest thing in the world
Last week, I showed Greg Isenberg a chart I’d made to explain Sublime’s “flywheel.”
He reduced it to a single line:
Taste + AI = ImpactHere’s the chart I had made:
How cool it is to have someone truly listen, take in your story, and then help you simplify what it is you are really after.
Mental fog comes not from lack of insight but from an excess of it. Smart people are uniquely vulnerable to mistaking complexity for insight (… the ten page memo that could be one). Complexity drugs us with the illusion of wisdom.
Back to the formula…
Taste + AI = ImpactI think at the heart of it…that’s what I’ve been simmering on for years now.
A lot of people talk about AI as a productivity upgrade. Faster this. Faster that. But that framing has never clicked for me.
AI is powerful, but power without direction is like a hamster spinning on wheels without moving forward. Taste is how you wield these tools to create work that matters.
This is the future we are building toward.
We’ll keep building the best tool to help you curate a living library of inspiration, and actually do something with it. We’ll keep hosting events to learn how to wield AI with taste (and just as importantly, when not to use it).
At the end of the day, we still believe in aspiring to greatness. In measuring success by the quality of what we make, not the number of tasks completed.
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For Sublime Premium members, below the paywall, the clip where Greg snaps this idea into focus.
Plus an invite to a live session with Lucas Crespo, one of the people I’m most drawn to using new tools to create aesthetics that feel alive and original. You’ll watch Lucas create a brand identity using a handful of references, and tools like Claude Code and Nanobanana.
