---
title: Taste is compressed time, a note by Arthur Galvão
url: https://arthurgalvao.work/notes/taste-is-compressed-time
lang: en
---

# Taste is compressed time, a note by Arthur Galvão

> Sep 18, 2026. Posted on [X](https://x.com/arthurgalvaorl/status/2100782601598378104), [LinkedIn](https://lnkd.in/p/d8P9rpXg)

Markdown version of https://arthurgalvao.work/notes/taste-is-compressed-time, the same content as the page, for AI agents and language models.

I work in fast environments and I like it that way. My instinct on almost anything is to get it out early. Speed is not the part I struggle with.

So a line quoted in Dazed this week landed on me sideways: "you can't be thoughtful quickly."

True, and incomplete. Most of what fills a week is execution, and treating every task as though it deserves contemplation is its own way of shipping nothing.

What changed with AI is that the slow part moved. Execution collapsed to almost nothing and judgment stayed where it was. It used to be a slice of the work and now it's most of it.

What lets you move fast through judgment is the word everyone is using right now: taste. You look at three directions and you know which one it is before you could explain why.

What gets left out of that conversation is where taste comes from. It's compressed time. Every snap decision I make well is one I already paid for, in years of making that same call slowly and badly until it stopped being slow.

Bryan Nash Gill's Woodcut prints are literally this. He didn't draw them. He cut a cross-section from a fallen tree, burned the surface so the soft spring growth fell away, inked what was left and pressed Japanese paper onto it by hand. The print is made by the tree.

Every ring is a year. The narrow ones are the hard years. You read the whole life in a second, and it took a whole life to make.

Time is king, and I mean practice, not deadlines.

And taste runs out. It works on problems I've seen before. On the ones I haven't, the eye has nothing to match against, and no amount of hours in a single week fixes that. It takes days, and usually days spent away from it.

I've used this one myself: "it needs to mature" is the most respectable excuse in our field. Slowness is a good hiding place, and it hides well because it looks like care.

So when something is sitting on my desk, I try to be honest about which one it is. Sometimes the work needs the days. Sometimes I just don't want to decide.

[All notes](https://arthurgalvao.work/notes.md)