Cooking a steak takes almost no skill — put it in a hot pan, flip it, and you get something technically edible. Making a genuinely good one, medium-rare edge to edge and consistently delicious, is a different matter entirely. Yurii Sydorets argues software development with AI has become exactly like this: we build nonstop, throwing agents, harnesses, prompts, and feedback loops at a model and hoping it returns what we imagined — and sometimes it does, and sometimes it serves up charcoal with a sprig of thyme, completely confident in the lie. The mistake is treating AI as a chef when it’s at best a steak machine: it can follow a recipe and repeat it at enormous scale, but it can’t know what you actually want unless you translate it into requirements, constraints, tests, and feedback. And when frustrated people pay for the expensive restaurant instead, they discover every restaurant in the city hired the same AI cook — the same burnt steak, because management optimizes for cost and most customers never notice the difference. You’ll notice, though, because this was something you actually wanted to make. The only way out is to learn to cook: understand what you’re asking for, judge what comes back, and catch the moment something is technically correct but wrong in every way that matters. AI can make you faster; it can’t replace your judgment.
Software Development with AI Is Starting to Feel Like Cooking Steak — Yurii Sydorets
AI makes building software as easy as frying a steak — and just as likely to hand you charcoal, confidently presented as medium-rare.