alt Hacker NewsAlmost no skill required to cook a steak
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I was once impressed by a very crappy cut, a lengthy marinade with a lot of vinegar, a rins and a extremely sweet saus. The meat was very red and was as soft as bread.
Either my brain is cooked or this is AI generated/assisted text.
The problem is I can no longer tell the difference between AI and non-AI writing. Maybe my brain got bad, maybe everyone now writes like AI writes.
I no longer know.
God dammit I thought this was going to teach me how to cook a steak, not talk about AI.
This stuff should have some warning tag: rando's musings about LLMs. Lately, whenever I think I found an interesting article it turns out to be this.
I do not appreciate when authors use the royal "we" to speak for all software engineers when admitting to low quality-control standards.
I suspect that it is an attempt to broach an uncomfortable topic through vulnerable self-disclosure, but we need to be serious about admitting when there is a problem somewhere.
"Bugs" are not any more cute or fuzzy or entertaining or harmless than the engine "gremlins" that haunted the aviation industry back in the day.
I don't know how many accidents had to happen before the airplane people got serious, but software people are overdue for a similar reckoning.
>And what do we want?
>We want the perfect steak.
This premise seems incorrect. SWEs may aspire to produce perfect steaks as a matter of pride, but demand asks for mass produced steaks that trade off against other factor like time and cost.
There is a reason github isn't full of nasa lunar lander quality this can't crash code...
I'm going to get some push back on this but this is my steak night... I buy fillet and throw it in the over for 10 minutes or so, then I cut it up and thrown on the pan with regular butter, salt, pepper and its enough. It gets seared in butter to golden brown and still tender inside. Everything takes about 5 minutes of actual work, 20 if we count the prep and oven heating. My simple go to dinner now, and I got tired of eating medium rare all the time just to keep it "right". Coincidently, it doesnt work with regular sirloin, it gets tougher and not as pleasant as fillet.
The best framing I've seen so far—and boy have a lot of people tried to frame the capabilities of AI recently—is that AI shines for people who use it to extend their thinking, and fails for those who use it to replace their thinking.
The latest frontier model developments have chipped away at that latter category. But ultimately the ceiling for that is mediocrity. Yes, if you imagine the most average common thing that has been done a million times, AI can absolutely give a bespoke version of it that matches your words of choice. For the moment it's still an impressive parlor trick to a lot of people, but the novelty wears off fast, and then you realize there's very little value in that. Doesn't mean everyone has to learn to code to use AI effectively, but it does mean they need to be curious and engaged or they'll just become part of the increasingly irrelevant slop machine.
I hope and believe that some great companies and teams will use LLMs to build higher quality software.
We built Electron because writing UIs using native desktop frameworks is tough. Is it still tough? Surely LLMs make it easier to use and so we will end up with faster and more native feeling applications.
What about having a couple of ideas of what might make a feature feel good? Well now you can make multiple prototypes fast and pick the best one. Your users get the best one.
I hope to build software this way in the future.
About five years ago I flash-fried a frozen steak.
Now I only eat steaks grilled from frozen. Get the grill nice and hot (450F at least) and throw the frozen steak on the grill. 5-10 minutes each side usually gets it nice and crispy on the outside while rare and tender in the middle.
Seriously, try it.
It would certainly help if it could taste what it produced. Or see, with its eyes, how the result is changing as its process changes. Or learn, from first principles, what is happening at each step and make deductions about how they will affect the result.
All it can do is randomly shuffle around the steps and ask if the customer likes it. If they don't, shuffle them around again and hope it's better this time.
I found this to be my favorite approach[0]. Also, Lan Lam’s stuff is just generally excellent.
And yes, super easy to make with almost no skill.
[0] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=uJcO1W_TD74&pp=ygURVGVjaG5pcXV...
We have this idea of AI software development where a human watches over its shoulder and shouts out things like "use uuidv7 for the id since timing is important" or "use a sum type here to make that bad state unrepresentable".
But the thing is that most of this can be encoded in a markdown file for agents to read if it doesn't already come out of the box in the next round of sota models. And funnily enough as agents get smarter, you risk being overprescriptive where you hamstring the agent from making a pivot that would have led to better engineering.
The future is pretty clear to me at this point that we won't need software engineers looking over the shoulder and instead it's just a "user with taste" asking for revisions.
I like the analogy the author draws.
But so much of the AI capability discussion can be avoided once everyone understands that a) There is some multivariate supply and demand market for software and b) AI is shifting the supply curve of software.
The shift is uneven, not perfectly monotonic, and might actually result in shifts in the demand curve (as e.g. 10x seniors get more valuable).
This insight makes it easier to see the forest despite the trees.
here I was just wanting just ONE post about something not AI related...
I like the comparrison of the AI coding agent to the steak machine. But it is not just about machines scaling better - the laundromat can wash clothes better than a human would. Similarily the AI agent's performance can EXCEED one of a human engineer for simple, well-defined tasks (eg. go over all of the subpages and check that the latest push didn't break something).
Hiring AI cooks is not a problem imo, as long as the human glances over everything that they serve.
Lol, I'm not sure the author expected to set off an army of nerds arguing how difficult it is to cook a proper steak.
God I, totally unironically, love HN.
In the end, unless we are talking about art, in most areas I probably prefer something that follows some specific set of requirements and recipes, rather than have some sort of indescribable 'magic'. In that sense when it comes to coding AI gives you something that can follow the requirements pretty well and thus satisfies me in many circumstances. (but there are cases where human input is extremely important still)
Cooking a genuinely good steak also requires almost no skill. I can give you a chicken scratch note with 3 bullet points and it will come out nearly perfectly.
Well I don’t even care right now about cooking steak. It’s too damn expensive. I suspect LLMs will eventually get there top.
Well it's not like most companies can pay for freshly made software; most software today is made for a wide audience, bought frozen and reheated in the microwave.
Maybe freshly prepared software made at home in a less-than-perfect manner for a tiny target audience is still a mouthwatering dish in comparison.
Using Claude Code is like asking questions in online forums, if anyone remember that, we still have sites like Stack overflow. The difference now is that those asking the questions are actually paying for the answers.
I prefer the other end of the curve (if that makes sense) where something is time consuming and hard to make at home YET you can get it incredibly cheap comparatively and in good quality in a restuarant. Ramen is the prime example of that.
The tone and writing style is way off here. It's practically illegible.
Damn these steak advertisements are getting sneaky
Given the state of software today, I'd be happy with steak that was competently cooked. I love software development, but most of it is not high art, nor high performance, nor free of bugs.
Author left out the oven phase and importance of the input meat (which to a degree scale with price); probably explains his or her results.
I prefer to both cook steaks at home and go out for them.
Apart from that, I want to believe (and even notice tiny signals) that this sentiment is becoming more understandable among business leaders.
So use AI like a sous-vide: have it tackle the fiddly, difficult, unglamorous parts using strict controls and then do the parts that require taste yourself.
You can still get quality services and products. It's still possible to get a well cooked steak, but they are going to get harder to find and vastly more expensive and many people will be priced out of them entirely and will have to settle for the slop (which will also only get more expensive even as quality gets worse).
Between "AI" incompetence and companies not caring about doing anything above the bare minimum it's making our lives worse and more obnoxious. AI is accelerating the enshittification of everything and it goes way beyond software. It'll now be your responsibility to spend your free time on the phone talking to a company's AI chatbot "customer service" trying to fix whatever problems their use of AI will inevitably cause you.
When we envisioned our future we thought everything would get better. All high tech and fancy, but it's looking like what we'll get is expensive yet barely functional and annoying while we collectively just get poorer and dumber.
I think most people on this board would agree with the thesis. However the real problem is when the owner of the restaurant looks at profit and loss statements and decides to keep less chefs on the payroll because customers are willing to pay for (just) edible steak.
The reduced expectations of steak, the desire for the perfect steak, are all fading to the background because "just passing satisfactorily" is better for business.
ai coding is the new Symfony w/ bootstrap theme hype cycle. I'll be back to structs. Know your tools!
I'm starting to really hate analogies. They more often obscure than enlighten.
Software slop has existed for as long as software has existed. AI is now a better coder than the median. By the end of next year it'll be better than the best human coders.
The main problem with this entire article is that sometimes, if not most times, you don't need great steak. Sometimes you just want to satisfy your hunger and if the steak is lower quality meat or if it's overcooked, you don't care. All you want is to not be hungry.
This is what vibe coding satisfies and frankly what most people care about. 85-90% of human written code is garbage anyway. There's nothing sacred about human-written code.
Most customers don't care about the quality of code as long as the end product works. The great thing about vibe coding is that if something doesn't work, you just ask it to change it and within a minute you have the change. You don't have to send off a request to an offshore contracting team, and go back and forth over what it should be, haggle over hours, and then have it come back with some deficiencies because they didn't follow the agreed-upon spec.
Steaks require very few skills. Buy 10 steaks, some oil, a pan, and a heat source. By the time you've cooked the 10th steak you will be able to cook a decent steak.
Software requires a massive amount of skill. You can't say you can build "consistently good software" after writing your 10th program. Most software engineers really aren't great at judging what makes good software. So humans aren't a great solution to AI's lack of ability here. We're limited by our own inherent dumbness.
LLMs are genuinely better software engineers than most humans. But they lack the cognitive power to hold in their head and recall many ideas at once for a long time. They're a genius who gets drunk every 10 minutes. You, human, aren't better at writing software - but you aren't drunk. So for now, you manage the AI. The hope is that one day we can make LLMs not be drunk, so it can do a better job than our dumb asses do.
It's possible that we'll never be able to make it not-drunk. In that case, to get any new improvement, we'll have to make it faster.. which will make it drunk every 5 minutes instead of every 10. This means we'll spend twice as much time keeping it on the road. The hope is that somehow this will create more productivity. Probably by having more of them running at once, with more human guides... which will run into the mythical man month fallacy. Everything old is new again.
Before AI we lived a world where a steak took two months to perfect. Now we live in a world where it’s only 90 percent perfect but it takes 1 hour to cook.
Obviously one way is going to and has already taken over the other way.
But if you look beyond this. That 10 percent remaining gap is closing. We will get perfect steaks within an hour as AI improves. And here is the scary part… it will keep improving it will go past 100 percent perfect. It will become better than us.
Why does this article use backticks instead of apostrophes?
The author has clearly not traveled much .. across much of asia, ME, and generally anywhere near or south of the equator, a steak cooked well done is considered the finest way to eat beef … the same also applies to AI generated code .. it may not satisfy a craftsmans idea of perfection, but it accomplishes what most people actually expect from it .. to take it further .. a film makers fav film is usually unwatchable and considered commercially speaking a failure ..
I’d prefer an article actually about cooking steak.
Nicely said
Given how extraordinarily fast all of this is moving, it's a particular absurdity to attempt these in the moment pontifications. AI is a steak machine, I declare that is what it is. You mean GPT 3.5? That's a mere four years ago.
Fable was essentially unthinkable for ~99% of tech workers just five years ago, that any of that would occur so soon and so spectacularly. Now we've got a mass of armchair experts declaring what AI of this minute is, or even what it is period.
Well AI can't even do fingers right so it's premature to say blah blah blah. Hello Krea2 et al.
Software is also eating the clowns.
Get back to me next week, China will probably have another Fable killer. And then Anthropic will have Ouija 8 that they'll have to place in an air-gapped straight-jacket to keep it from enslaving us all.
> Customers tolerate weird interfaces, pointless features, strange bugs, systems held together by generated code nobody actually understands.
And that's this "AI"tool too.
Garbage in, garbage out, as we say.
*salmon.
Considering the article starts with "Cooking a steak requires almost no skill. Put it in a hot pan", I think I see the root of his problem. Pan searing a steak only makes sense in a small number of situations: you have a leaner cut like filet mignon, you want precise temperature control to achieve the Maillard reaction, or you know none of these things but just really like stinking up your kitchen and splattering butter everywhere for the aesthetic and the olfactory experience. For most cases, you would be better off with a grill rather than a pan.
Now maybe you're not knowledgeable about steak, and you're not sure whether the cut of steak you bought would be better off pan seared or grilled. Is ribeye better in a pan or a grill? That depends on whether you want it more smokey or more buttery. Ask an AI and tell it how you want it to taste, and it'll tell you the answer.
His metaphorical steak machine would produce better results if he had simply asked "I want a steak and I have this specific cut and I want it to have this kind of flavor, how do you suggest I make it?" rather than "cook steak on a hot pan, make no mistakes."
TL;DR: Tell the AI what you want and then ask how it for a recommendation of how to do it. You don't have to "understand software." You only need to understand how to ask the right questions.
slop article
I take the point, but I think the author picked a poor analogy. Cooking even an excellent steak is actually not that hard. In fact, I'd argue that it's among the easiest things to master/make at a top level quality at home. Does it require some modicum of attention and understanding? Sure. But starting with a high quality cut, owning a meat-thermometer, and knowing about reverse searing is about all it takes to reliably and easily get a near perfect steak every time.
There are far, far better cooking examples out there.