I majored in communication studies in college. It was in one of those classes that I first encountered the concept of "curation." That was the era of Web 2.0, when blogs and YouTube were just emerging and everyone was suddenly pouring UGC onto the internet. Now, more than a decade later, I think curation is becoming important again.

Thanks to AI, content is pouring out at a pace incomparable to the early web. AI is no longer just generating content; it's steadily taking over the execution work humans used to do. And the easier it becomes to make and execute things, the more it matters to judge what's actually worth making, and to choose one result out of countless possibilities.

That process of choosing and judging is closely related to curation. Curation goes beyond simply collecting. It means deciding what to include and exclude according to a particular perspective and purpose, then arranging the relationships and context among those choices so their meaning can emerge. As those choices accumulate, they become a person's distinct eye: their taste, their point of view.

Of course, curation and a good eye were always important. What's genuinely new in the age of AI isn't that importance itself, but the scope in which curation operates.

In the Web 2.0 era, curation was mostly about deciding what to look at and what to connect amid an overflow of existing content. In the age of AI, the scope of what we must choose is widening. Selected information and examples become context and criteria that AI can draw on when producing results. At the same time, as AI generates countless outputs more quickly, people still have to decide which problems to address and which results to put into the world. The selection and judgment involved in curation are becoming important beyond organizing content, throughout the production process.

This shift is also changing what matters when evaluating a developer's capability. The problems they chose, how they solved them, and the standards that guided their judgment were already important parts of that evaluation. But as agentic coding spreads and implementation itself becomes easier, it gets harder to assess a developer's capability from coding ability or finished output alone. The judgment revealed in choosing and solving problems therefore carries more weight.

The same is true for designers. What they consider beautiful, how finely they break a problem down before thinking it through, and why they made a particular choice among countless possibilities: all of this is becoming more important. The faster AI can produce a plausible-looking result, the harder it becomes to judge someone's actual capability from the result alone. The ability to explain not just what you made, but what you discarded and why you kept what you kept, is becoming just as important as the output itself.

The more AI makes and executes, the more important the curator's role becomes for people: deciding what to select, how to relate it, and what to put into the world. As those choices and judgments accumulate across projects, a person's point of view becomes visible.

Think about a museum or a gallery. Each one collects the works it considers important, based on the values and themes it stands for. It then designs the relationships and sequence of those works, shaping an exhibition around the message it wants to convey. As these choices accumulate over time, people naturally come to associate a certain museum with a certain subject. Museums didn't just collect works; they repeatedly chose what to preserve and what to exhibit. And that accumulated pattern of choices eventually became the museum's point of view, its identity.

In the same vein, I think individuals will need to become curators of their own small museums. This means collecting and connecting the materials and outcomes they consider important, and recording why they chose them. Finished work alone is not enough to fill this museum. It should also show what they saw as the problem, what they chose and discarded, the standards by which they revised the work, and when they decided it was finished. Over time, those accumulated choices become more than taste; they become a point of view.

A museum curated in this way is, in a sense, also a portfolio. Perspective and taste are hard to prove through a resume or a self-introduction alone. When you consistently show the world what you've chosen and how you've connected it, people come to understand who you are through that accumulation. And that understanding can naturally lead to new relationships and new opportunities.

Going forward, people won't trust someone based on their words or their title alone. They'll look at what that person has collected and discarded over a long period of time, and by what standards they made those choices. In the end, we're heading toward an era where we discover and trust each other's perspective and taste through the small museums each of us has built.