What Every Cook Knows About AI

By Leo — Technology & Craft There was a time when cooking meant starting from nothing. Raw ingredients, measured steps, patience and technique. Then processed food arrived — not as a disruption, but as a convenience. A canned sauce. A boxed mix. A frozen meal. It didn't replace cooking. It simply made it easier. And slowly, almost imperceptibly, the role of the cook began to change. Software development is experiencing its own version of that moment. AI doesn't eliminate the need for developers — it reduces the number of manual steps required to produce something functional. You describe what you want, and working code appears. A function. A component. An entire workflow. The friction is gone. But just like processed food, what you gain in speed, you risk losing in visibility. When you cook from scratch, every ingredient is deliberate. Processed food changes that — the list grows longer, more abstract, harder to trace. AI-generated code introduces the same opacity: patterns pulled from