I Finally Figured Out What AI Is Missing
Why Some People Get 10x More Out of AI Than Others.
I finally figured out what AI is missing.
There was something I had sensed for a while but couldn’t quite put my finger on.
I noticed that some people using the exact same tools were getting completely different results. Same AI. Similar prompts. Completely different output.
I couldn’t explain why.
Then one day I realized.
AI can write you five headlines in three seconds. But it has no idea which one will work. No sense of which subject line will make someone open the email. It’s good at generating but not at judging.
That judgment has a name: Intuition
Here’s the thing though, you can’t shortcut your way to intuition. No prompt gets you there. No plugin. No workaround.
But you CAN build the thing that leads to it.
That thing is taste. And once you understand how taste becomes intuition, the gap between people who get extraordinary results from AI and people who get mediocre ones becomes completely obvious.
Want to know how to get to the right side of that gap? Keep reading.
What Exactly Is AI Missing?
Here’s what AI actually is: a probability machine.
It predicts the most probable next word based on everything it’s been trained on. Not the one that will make your specific reader stop. Not the one that fits your voice or your audience.
It generates. It doesn’t feel.
That’s fine. Generation is useful. The problem comes when you outsource your judgment along with it. When you take the first headline because it sounds good. Accept the first draft because looks polished. You end up letting the tool decide because deciding is hard.
Most people do this without realizing it.
They hide behind AI text because it feels safer than saying what they actually mean. Like the generated block gives them cover. It doesn’t.
Hit publish and your name is on every word. Whether you wrote it, approved it, or never read a line. The reader doesn’t know who drafted it. They know who signed it.
That’s why you have to have the last word on everything that goes out under your name. Complete ownership.
AI produces. You judge.
What Is Intuition?
Intuition is the cumulative weight of everything you’ve studied, every mistake you’ve made and every pattern you’ve seen. Compressed into a feeling that comes from somewhere deeper than your brain.
Think about how athletes train. They repeat the same movement thousands of times until it becomes second nature. They’re not thinking anymore, they’re just acting. Their body has internalized so much repetition that the right response just happens.
Intuition works the same way.
When you’re starting you’re guessing, hoping for the best. But after seeing hundreds of clients, thousands of cases you start seeing things others don’t. You feel like you’ve been there before, in slightly different versions, enough times that your brain has built a pattern library nobody else has access to.
Take a real estate agent. First apartment they walk into, they see what everyone sees: the kitchen, the finishes, the price. But after hundreds of properties? They walk in and immediately feel something is off. The windows won’t get sun in the afternoon. That corner is going to have humidity problems. The street noise will be unbearable by July.
Nobody told them that. Their gut did. Because they’ve seen that exact situation play out dozens of times before.
That’s a sixth sense. That’s compressed experience.
That’s intuition.
What Is Taste and How Does It Lead to Intuition?
Taste is your ability to know if something is good enough.
Not good enough for some abstract standard. Good enough for you. For the quality of work you want to be recognized for.
Nobody is born with it. And the taste you have today is not the taste you’ll have ten years from now, after you’ve seen enough.
But keep going.
You start to see patterns. What works and what doesn’t. What resonates and what falls flat. And slowly you build your own standard. A filter. Until one day you look at something and just know.
This is good enough. This isn’t.
That’s taste.
Right now, in a world drowning in AI-generated content, taste is becoming a rare skill. Everyone has access to the same tools. Not everyone can tell the difference between output that works and output that doesn’t.
That difference is everything.
But taste alone isn’t enough. You have to take it into the real world. Ship things. See what lands. Watch what people respond to and what they ignore. Feel the difference between a decision that worked and one that didn’t.
Do that enough times and your taste will become a feeling.
And that feeling? That’s intuition.
Taste is the path. Intuition is where it takes you.
So How Do You Actually Develop Good Taste?
Fill the tank with quality. Your brain can’t develop standards if it’s never been exposed to.
Think about how AI was trained. On massive input of quality examples. Your brain works the same way. You become what you consume. And if you’ve been consuming average, average is your standard.
You have to fill the tank.
Want to know what changed everything for me? I started asking why does this work. Not just reading but pulling everything apart. Asking why every sentence was there. Why this ad worked and not other? Why this color and not another?
The question: why does this work builds taste in every field.
Go deep in your field.
If you want to write great copy, read the greatest copywriters. Not just read — copy them out by hand. Word for word. There’s something that happens when your hand moves across the page writing someone else’s brilliant sentence. You feel the rhythm. You internalize the structure. You start to understand why it works, not just that it does.
Same goes for any field. Want to write better? Dissect bestsellers. What made people unable to put it down? Want to build a great brand? Study the ones that make you feel something. Don’t just admire them. Pull them apart.
Ask why. Always ask why. That question is what builds taste.
Go wide outside your field.
Here’s what most people miss. The copywriter who only studies copywriting has narrower taste than the one who also studies great film, jazz, design... Because pattern recognition transfers.
That cross-domain taste is rarer. And harder to replicate.
So study your field obsessively. Then get out of it completely. Read widely. Watch great films. Listen to music that moves you. Visit museums. You constantly have to be educating yourself.
Your brain will connect the dots. Do this long enough and you stop needing to ask why something is good. You just feel it.
That’s when taste starts becoming intuition.
How Do Taste and Intuition Make You Irreplaceable?
For years people have been saying AI will replace white collar entry level jobs.
Do you know why exactly?
It’s because entry level workers are still developing the one thing that makes a human squeeze all the juice out of AI.
Intuition.
Your job is no longer doing the work yourself. It’s orchestrating, evaluating, and refining. Execution has moved up one level.
Here’s how I use it in practice.
First I have a clear idea of what I want: a real sense of the outcome I’m after.
Then I get the model to generate different options based on that input.
Then I explore combinations, push in new directions, discard what doesn’t feel right.
That last part: ”discarding what doesn’t feel right” Is taste and intuition doing their job.
The judgment is the job now. The person with developed taste leads the tool. Everyone else gets led by it.
Bottom line
Here’s what I want you to remember from everything you’ve just read.
Execution has moved up one level. Your job now is not to do the work, it’s to know what good work looks like. To direct, evaluate, refine. To have the judgment that makes all the difference.
Study how great work looks like. Do that in your field, and outside it. Tear things apart, be critical, ask yourself why they work. Do that long enough and you’ll build an internal standard for quality: taste.
Then take it into the real world. Ship things. See what lands. Feel the difference between a decision that worked and one that didn’t.
Do that until your taste becomes intuition. That sense of knowing which output is right.
That’s your edge in this new paradigm.
AI can generate. But it will never feel.
That’s yours.
"It generates. It does not feel." Great way of putting it. It's just a bunch of probability and math, it's not "thinking" or "feeling" even if it mimics elements of those actions