Agents make things fast. The risk is that it's rubbish, and nobody wants fast rubbish. Only humans should decide what to make, because companies are made of people, and people are messy. Taste is knowing what feels right: like the screen that feels a bit off and needs another go. Judgement is knowing whether the thing is any good, or worth making at all: like the interview where someone says one thing and means another, or the insight that sends the whole project in a stronger direction. Agents help us do the work, but one of us always signs it off, and answers for it when it's live.
Where the care goes
Agents produce more than anyone could check by hand, so taste is mostly about where a person's attention goes. It goes where something can look right, but still be wrong.
An agent can summarise twenty interviews in seconds, and the summary reads just as well whether or not anyone said what it claims. In research, agents handle the transcripts and the tagging, a researcher does the listening, and every finding has to lead back to the moment someone said it. An agent will happily make a claim that sounds profound and, when you push on it, turns out to be nonsense.
An agent will write an error message in seconds, and it'll be accurate. Whether it helps someone who has just lost their work, or only tells them what broke, is a designer's call.
Taste also means knowing when not to bother. A prototype built to test one idea with five people on Thursday doesn't need its edge cases polished, and a day spent on them is a day not spent on the question it was built to answer.
Someone always answers for it
Everything that leaves the studio has a person's name on it. Agents do most of the making and a fair share of the checking. But, "the agent did it" is never an answer we give a client, so the call on whether something is ready stays with the person who'll stand behind it. That holds for a pitch or a deck the studio skills drafted as much as for a product.
It's also why the checks on whether something works for people stay with people: reading each change before it goes in, using the product with a keyboard and a screen reader, and deciding it's ready to release. They're the slow part of a fast process, and they're how the person signing it off knows what they're signing. How we make shows where each one sits.