The steak analogy breaks at the part where you check the work

The most argued over link in the feed this week was a post titled almost no skill required to cook a steak, making the case that building software with LLMs is starting to feel the same way. Three hundred and sixty five points, three hundred and eighty six comments. Sitting a few slots below it, a piece on why hobby programming communities are against LLM usage, at four hundred and fifteen points and nearly five hundred comments. Same week, same nerve.

The steak framing is good, and worth taking seriously instead of dunking on. Buy a decent cut, get the pan hot, leave it alone for four minutes, let it rest. Most of the craft moved into the supply chain and the equipment. That really is what has happened to a lot of code.

But a steak has a property software does not. You can cut it open. The feedback is immediate, cheap, unambiguous, and the person eating it is the person who cooked it.

The vault’s coding workflow notes describe what checking costs once the dish is a system. A whole branch review has to run the real pipeline rather than read the diffs, because two decisions can each be defensible alone and incompatible together. One recorded failure had fixtures shaped so the gate could not detect the production problem it existed to catch. That is not a taste test. That is a day.

As for the hobbyists, their objection reads as something other than a skill argument. They were never there for the steak. They were there for the cooking.

What got cheap was producing the thing. Checking it did not, and checking was always most of what the job actually was.