One of my not-so-secret fantasies has been to become a professional chef. I’m sure that I’m not alone :)

Cooking beautifully ties science, art, and culture together. I learned to cook from my mom, who is an incredible chef. Having a lovingly slow-cooked meal with great ingredients can easily become among a person’s most cherished life experiences.

Lately I’ve been thinking that making software has become much closer to making meals. The similarities are hard to miss:

• Anyone can cook. Not everyone will open a restaurant, but most people can put a nutritious meal on the table. Claude Code has done something similar for software. The barrier to producing something that works is now astonishingly low.
• Ingredients matter more than technique. A great chef with bad fish makes a bad dinner. In software, the model you choose, the problem you pick, and whether anyone actually wants what you’re making will determine the outcome far more than how clever your implementation is.
• It’s now about the craft. For years, software engineering was mostly about learning frameworks and writing code. Most of our time went to how to build, not what to build. That has flipped. You can spend months with a big team building the wrong thing, and no amount of AGI will save you. I’ve watched it happen. You can also have a small, beautiful idea, use AI, and ship something that changes lives in a week.

So yes, in many ways, I’m now a chef. The interesting question isn’t whether I can cook. It’s what I want to cook.

A lovingly cooked gourmet meal, or McDonald’s?