Article URL: https://blog.sydorets.com/en/posts/almost-no-skill-required-to-cook-a-steak/ Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49198069 Points: 90 # Comments: 96

Why AI can make software development faster without replacing the judgment and understanding needed to build consistently good software. Put it in a hot pan, wait a little, flip it, and eventually you’ll have something technically edible. But a genuinely good steak, medium-rare from edge to edge, browned properly, seasoned right, consistently delicious, is a different matter entirely. We build nonstop now. With AI, without AI, during the commute, on the toilet, probably in our sleep. We create agents, harnesses, tools, skills, prompts, feedback loops, elaborate workflows. Then we throw everything at a model and hope it gives us what we imagined, without ever having to understand how any of it actually works. We want software that works, looks good, feels polished, and arrives exactly as we imagined it. Most of all, we want the same result every time. Sometimes the model hands us something surprisingly good. Other times it serves up charcoal with a sprig of thyme on top and calls it medium-rare, completely confident in the lie. We pay for a premium AI product, hire an agency, subscribe to another coding assistant, jump to a new framework promising professional results. We hope someone else already solved the problem for us. Sometimes they have. Quite often, they haven’t. That leaves two choices: learn to cook properly ourselves, or keep asking friends for restaurant recommendations while preparing our wallets for the next expensive disappointment. Most of us want to build something we care about with AI without getting lost in the implementation details. We want to treat it like a professional chef working in our own kitchen: tell it what we want, step away, come back when dinner’s ready.