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MostlyStable 1 days ago [-]
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.
MerrimanInd 1 days ago [-]
I'm more of a coffee nerd than a steak aficionado but I've often made the comparison between those two. In both cases, the enthusiast considers their skill in making coffee/cooking steak to be a differentiator and they immerse themselves deeply into the process, skills, and tools. But for both coffee beans and steak the most important factor for a good end product is starting with high quality inputs. In other words, most of the work is being done by the farmers, the processors, and the quality of the raw stock (the cow or the coffee plant). Your job at the very end of that long value adding chain is to not ruin the hard work that others have put into it.
I'm not sure if this analogy holds up in the AI software metaphor that the author of the blog post is making.
jaggederest 1 days ago [-]
Coffee is a good metaphor here too, because bad technique can ruin a good steak just as surely as good coffee. "knows how to use a meat thermometer and reverse sear" describes like 10% of the population or less, same with coffee - there are people who use a bad grinder and a not-regularly-cleaned Mr. Coffee with good beans and get gas station coffee, and there are people out there making solidly B+ class coffee using costco beans, a no name burr grinder, and a french press.
I'd bring the cheapo French press kit it into the A- domain once you appreciate the number one trick to making good coffee: DON'T BOIL THE WATER. Water that is hot, but well below boiling brings out the flavor of the beans a million times more than boiling water. Get a glass kettle, and turn it off when you start to get some decent bubble action on the bottom.
Once you get that down, zomg - a French press with even the cheapest beans you find can make an amazzzzzing cup of coffee. Beats the pants of Starbucks, and comes quite close to a proper cup of coffee made with good beans. Another trick is to rotate your cheap beans, instead of just sticking to your favorite. Dark roast of choice one week, medium the next, and so on. By the time you loop back to your favorite, it'll taste unbelievable.
atraac 15 hours ago [-]
> DON'T BOIL THE WATER. Water that is hot, but well below boiling brings out the flavor of the beans a million times more than boiling water.
That actually depends on the coffee. Pouring 99C+ water onto light roasted coffee is perfectly fine in most cases and will actually extract more.
WA 16 hours ago [-]
Starbucks uses espresso machines that cost 4-5 figures. They have automatic thermal control. They never boil the water. While I agree with your overall sentiment, claiming that Starbucks makes coffee too hot and thus tastes bad is nonsense.
pnt12 13 hours ago [-]
I'm from Portugal and we have a strong espresso culture, as in 90% of the people probably have multiple espresso every day. Many Portuguese agree that Starbucks espresso sucks compared to most conventional cafes. At most people go there for the American type drinks, which are a complete different style (and the coffee flavor hides behind all other ingredients, it doesn't have to be that good).
jdcasale 9 hours ago [-]
The previous comment didn't say that Starbucks doesn't suck (they probably agree that it does -- I've never met anyone who really likes coffee who doesn't agree that modern at-scale Starbucks is awful), they just asserted that the badness there is not explained by faulty temperature control.
somenameforme 13 hours ago [-]
I'm not speculating why Starbucks coffee tastes how it does, I have no idea there. It's just a handy medium for comparison because a cup in Laos is going to taste the same as a cup in NYC. And while they don't make great coffee, they also don't make horrible coffee - and so I think beating Starbucks is a pretty good and understandable baseline to aim for.
d4ng 12 hours ago [-]
So why does Starbucks coffee still consistently taste like shit?
jaggederest 12 hours ago [-]
The more you roast the beans, the less terroir you taste, so you can use cheaper and less uniform beans. In Starbucks case this has become a brand identity, so it has persisted past strictly practical concerns. Many people dislike the kind of acidity and strange flavors you can get from lighter roasted coffee, at least in the milk drinks they want to sell, and light roasts are also harder to get perfect and consistent, so that is another point against it (or the same through a different lens)
Personally I prefer a light or medium roast over an Italian or French roast, but many people disagree
ThunderSizzle 12 hours ago [-]
So you buy their sugary crap to hide the shit coffee.
Pumpkin spice lattes.
lelanthran 16 hours ago [-]
> DON'T BOIL THE WATER. Water that is hot, but well below boiling
"Boiling" differs in temperature from place to place.
Mineral content of water, altitude makes a large difference.
Iolaum 15 hours ago [-]
Not sure this is a meaningful factor for normal circumstances (for example below 1km altitude and for water that's safe to drink).
According to CGPT at 1km altitude the boiling temperature of water is 96.7 C.
brailsafe 13 hours ago [-]
> Not sure this is a meaningful factor for normal circumstances (for example below 1km altitude and for water that's safe to drink).
Some very populated cities are above 2km, many are above 1km, and most great coffee is grown ~>=2km. Water hardness and flavour is a big deal as well.
bestham 17 hours ago [-]
Are you saying that the temperature of the water when it hit the ground beans that matter or the fact that the water was brought up to a boil or 100°C?
somenameforme 17 hours ago [-]
The temperature when it makes contacts with the ground beans. I see no reason why you couldn't boil it and then let it cool first.
geocar 16 hours ago [-]
> The temperature when it makes contacts with the ground beans. You could certainly boil it and then let it cool first, but that'd take a lot of extra work.
It's not so much work with the right tool: I have a button on my kettle that does exactly that, and another button that will use a little thermostat to keep it warm. Works great.
I know people who can cook a lot of food pretty well, but don't understand why they can't use a laser thermometer to check their meat.
Knowing really is half the battle.
aqme28 1 days ago [-]
If you cook enough you can tell by feel
muzani 22 hours ago [-]
The resistance of the steak is going to depend on what cut of meat you are poking (sirloin is stiffer than filet), the grade of meat (prime is more tender than select), how thick it is (thick cuts will yield more than thin), the age of the steer (young is more tender), the breed of steer (cooked Wagyu is more tender than Holstein), the age of the meat (wet aged is more tender than fresh killed), and what the steer was fed (corn fed is usually more tender than grass fed), among other things. [1]
It's not entirely a myth; if you've poked hundreds of steaks by the same supplier, same cuts, same grade, you'll eventually get a feel for them.
The thermometer analogy does carry over though. Some people are not there to be productive or good at their jobs. The job is about them, not their work.
And you can go your whole life without ever cooking or tasting a good steak. The people who can tell the difference will go elsewhere, and those who can't will come back.
And then there's always the boss who wishes he started a franchise but will go with what he has - he'll hire a bunch of newbies or foreign workers who know how to use a thermometer.
They have a thermometer with multiple sensors in it that finds the core temperature of the food you're cooking automatically, and predicts the rise in temperature over time. So the alarm goes off when it's time to pull and rest, which is absolutely amazing.
throwaway2037 19 hours ago [-]
Is this company owned by either Chris Young or Kenji Lopez-Alt? A few times I have seen them using this product and promoting it. I am curious if a bunch of influencer chefs decided to create a company to create this product.
klausa 18 hours ago [-]
AIUI it's owned by Chris, and Kenji is a fan, but doesn't have any ties other than that.
bsder 24 hours ago [-]
I have one of the Combustion thermometers, and I like it. I used it more than I expected. In particular, I use it for roasting chicken and for sous vide things more than anything else. Then I got a Breville Control Freak, and I used it much less. :)
For maximum techyness, Combustion, Inc. correctly identified that sous vide is normally an overdamped system. If you follow their instructions you can increase the water temp some and then bring it back down in order to move the system closer to critically damped and speed up your sous vide.
deanputney 23 hours ago [-]
I've had a Combustion thermometer since they came out. The best uses for me are butterflied whole chicken on the grill and roasts in the oven. You can get extremely precise results and account for carry over cooking very easily. Huge leap in results.
lkjdsklf 1 days ago [-]
The funny part is steak is one of the easiest foods to cook without a thermometer
You don’t have to worry about undercooking like you do with most other meats and most steak cuts will be delicious anywhere from 11-130 (if you cook a filet to 130, it won’t be the best but it’ll still be good) and some can go even higher
It’s not like poultry where the range where it’s “good” is very small. A 170 chicken breast is almost inedible and 160 is not safe…
kasey_junk 24 hours ago [-]
I agree with your broader point but the chicken food safety thing is missing a ton of important nuance. The safety comes from how long you hold the meat at the temp. 165 is the safe point if you are only holding for 10s. 145 is safe if you hold it for 10 minutes.
This is why sous vide is such a popular way to cook chicken. You can hold a breast at 145 for hours trivially.
jghn 17 hours ago [-]
Or understand risk ratios and don't rely on food that's 100% safe.
lkjdsklf 19 hours ago [-]
Sure. But then you need a thermometer.
jimbo808 20 hours ago [-]
160 degrees for a chicken breast is perfectly safe. Considerably lower temperatures can also produce microbiologically safe chicken when combined with sufficient holding time.
165 is a rough rule of thumb, not some magic number like the boiling point of water at 1 bar or something.
In particular, I use 135F for 90 minutes (75 minimum recommended) to pasteurize eggs that I am going to be putting into something that asks for "raw" eggs (egg nog, mayonnaise, etc.) that I will serve to other people (if it's just for myself, I'll probably just be lazy and use the raw egg). So far, nobody has noticed any difference from "raw".
pixl97 1 days ago [-]
They have digital thermometers now that will map out the temperature curve and even predicted when the meat will reach core temp. You really don't need to use them many times before you internalize the behavior.
phearnot 17 hours ago [-]
laser thermometer only measures surface temperature, unlike meat probes that measure internal temp. depending on the cut size or shape, initial temperature and probably some other factors internal temp will vary wildly for the given surface temperature. combustion probes mentioned in the sibling measure temp in several points at once to estimate readings even more precisely.
jmaw 1 days ago [-]
Ok, using a laser thermometer for food is hilarious. Thanks for this xD
OJFord 1 days ago [-]
It's not wrong for all food, surface temperature measurement has its place, you just have to understand it is surface measurement.
Ekaros 1 days ago [-]
It is reasonable for measuring cooking environment. Like say pizza oven. Just have to be aware of things like right emissivity.
buildsjets 1 days ago [-]
I use it to spot check the temp of my cast iron pan all the time.
psalaun 1 days ago [-]
for a caramel or some sauces it's legit
cogman10 1 days ago [-]
Perhaps I'm crazy, but I truly can't taste much of a difference between "good" coffee and "bad" coffee.
I can certainly tell the difference between a good steak and a bad one.
nunez 1 days ago [-]
You'll start to taste the difference once you get that one really-well-made pourover at a place that _lives_ for the love of coffee.
There are some coffee beans that have crazy taste profiles when properly extracted with the right water. I had one that tastes literally like a peach and another that tasted like a really nice tea.
Or maybe not. Different strokes!
cogman10 1 days ago [-]
So I can taste differences, but they simply don't matter enough for me. My areopressed coffee with nice fresh locally roasted beans does taste different from a mcdonalds pot. Less harsh, less chemically flavored. But for me those differences don't really matter. They are close enough that I can enjoy both.
But I would say I know I'm also weird in that food temp really doesn't bother me all that much. I enjoy my coffee even as it goes from hot to cold.
A steak for me can be more easily messed up. But then I've not tried instant coffee so maybe I've just never tasted the bottom of the barrel for coffee.
brailsafe 13 hours ago [-]
Most people can't will themselves to even drink coffee without sugar and cream to dampen the bitterness. You care enough to make your normal coffee at least quite good, but maybe not enough to obsess beyond that, and that's fine, not everything needs to be a hobby.
Additionally, if you mess up a really good steak, that's like $30+, whereas if I mess up a pourover, that's ~$20/(340g / grams per cup); a relatively small risk surface.
Personally, I think if you actually like coffee, most of it should be drinkable, and the really great cups with rare beans that sit on the margins can be appreciated occasionally for what they are when fortune prevails. The bottom of the barrel for me is basically anything "second wave" or straight out of a gas station. Even instant coffee and McDonalds isn't as bad a place that has "Java" in the name or claims to have "gourmet" coffee. Older Italian places often fall into this, because (some) tend use the absolute cheapest Robusta beans with the harshest darkest roast profiles. Robusta tends to be the most rubbery burnt tire tasting crap out there.
harrall 1 days ago [-]
Same but I’m sure my sense of smell is weaker (or average?). On the other hand, my sense of color differentiation is extremely fine.
Unsurprisingly my interests are very color-dominant (design, art, fashion) and I do not care for anything where smell matters (wine, coffee, flowers).
jaggederest 1 days ago [-]
Yeah Mcdonalds is, at this point, acceptably C-grade coffee. You have to go to something like a cafe bustelo in distilled water to get the full contrast.
Really, I get it, even bad pizza is still pizza.
9dev 1 days ago [-]
It’s about experience. If you’re not into classical music, or jazz, or metal, it all sounds the same - how could anybody tell the difference? Only when you put in the work to listen to it a lot, different works, and actually pay attention, you will notice how your sense and understanding develops over time. Suddenly you’re able to make out differences, recognise patterns and repeated segments and structure where before there was none.
Or pick dancing: when you start out, you’re entirely occupied with placing your feet in the right spots at the right time. As you practice, your mind gets freed up and you’re able to make deliberate alterations, embellishments, larger figures. That seems impossible at the start.
whythismatters 1 days ago [-]
Believe me, there's a huge spectrum, from the sweet aroma of freshly ground Brazilian beans to straight up cat piss coffee sold in supermarkets.
konart 1 days ago [-]
No offence, but for some reason some people just can't accept a simple fact: for some people this difference is still not a difference.
I've tried good coffee. At least that's what people told ne on multiple accasions where I was taken to "the right places" in multiple countries. On two sides of the globe (Brazil and Vietnam if we are talking about producers, not to mention countries that import the beans).
Thing is: no matter where it grows, no matter how they prepare it, fermented or not, different frying, different brewing techniques - all the same to me.
I can tell the difference. Some times small, some times very huge. But still for this difference is like a cat piss from some street cat and a cat with a pedigree.
It may have the ideal temperature, ideal acid levels, zinc amounts or whatever - still tastes like cat piss. The fact that it has a pedigree does not make it better.
Tea is whole different story for me though. But I do accepts that people are fine with whatever they love in their "english breakfast tea" or a nameless teabag.
sethammons 23 hours ago [-]
All coffee tastes like cigarette ash to me. Similarly, I have been to places that people rave about. My buddy used to run a coffee shop. "Your beans were overcooked"; no, not it. There is something innate to espresso or something. Smells amazing. Tastes like ash.
chongli 19 hours ago [-]
Good espresso is really difficult to make, with the lighter the roast, the harder it is to get right. Most coffee shops can get good quality beans that smell amazing but without a well-practiced barista the shots will be excessively sour or bitter.
Dialling in espresso isn’t simply a matter of finding the right grind setting on the grinder and locking it in. One coffee may pour a perfect 9 bar espresso and then a different coffee might gush like a shower head and spray sour, weak coffee all over the place, while a third coffee could jam up like squeezing water out of a stone, with barely a drop of extremely bitter liquid falling in the cup, all on the same grind setting!
In other words, every batch of coffee beans needs to be dialled in separately, and there can also be a lot more adjustments needed than simply the grind (water temperature and brew ratio are big factors as well). An expert will know how to adjust at least those 3 variables (grind, temperature, ratio) all in concert to get the most out of a particular coffee. On top of all that, the true master can make use of grinder type (burr design) pressure, flow, and even temperature profiling to fully customize a shot, but that’s going far into the weeds.
sethammons 10 hours ago [-]
Ash. I am telling you, preparation matters not.
youaremidwit 7 hours ago [-]
[dead]
epihelix 7 hours ago [-]
Interestingly, that's many people's experience (including my own) of drinking good coffee with covid. I'm so sorry, is all I can say :(
chongli 19 hours ago [-]
Question: how is your sense of smell? My friend has the same opinion about coffee as you (he just drinks cheap diner joe) and his sense of smell is almost nonexistent.
I, on the other hand, have a pretty good nose and I can pick out peach, raspberry, toasted nuts, caramel, marshmallow, chocolate, and blueberry notes from a variety of different coffees I’ve bought. The smell of some of these coffees is mesmerizing, like walking into a high end patisserie.
Without that smell component, the coffees taste either sour or bitter or somewhere in between.
bigDinosaur 19 hours ago [-]
I honestly fail to understand the relevance of "some people can't tell the difference or just don't care". Good (or not) for them?
konart 12 hours ago [-]
Sorry, I don't really understand your question.
10 hours ago [-]
tbrownaw 23 hours ago [-]
> can't taste much of a difference between "good" coffee and "bad" coffee.
I found a 5+ year old half-full bag in the back of the pantry once; that was quite noticeably bad even though I usually can't tell the difference between kinds beyond recognizing that there is some sort of difference.
jaggederest 1 days ago [-]
I thought that too, honestly, before I had truly great coffee. I honestly didn't like coffee at all, and then a coworker brought in some coffee he'd roasted and prepared himself and it was lifechangingly good. I also made myself incredibly sick with the enormous amount of caffeine, it's been very rare that I've had to go home from work in the middle of the day but that was one.
inglor 1 days ago [-]
That likely means that you've only had "bad" coffee. You're one of today's lucky 10,000 - go treat yourself to a decent cup of coffee it tastes completely different. The difference between a good steak and a bad steak is actually a good comparison.
flaunf221 1 days ago [-]
Sometimes it's a matter of not having taste for it. If you give me multiple bottles of alcohol drinks, I might be able to distinguish them, but I have no clue at all which ones are supposed to be good. To me it's all just alcohol. Same with coffee - but not the same for steak.
greengrocer 1 days ago [-]
Or perhaps they've only had good coffee, so they should try some instant coffee past its use-by date to compare.
jaggederest 1 days ago [-]
Here's an obligatory Tom Scott + James Hoffmann episode:
I bet the same analogy can be applied to cooking a cucumber.
jaggederest 1 days ago [-]
Pickling a cucumber sure has a lot of resemblance - a great cucumber is good fresh and great pickled, but a bad pickling brine can ruin even a great cucumber.
miyoji 1 days ago [-]
I don't know if I agree with the take I've written below, but I think you can make the analogy work:
It has been argued, even in the before-AI-times, that most professional software is just gluing together open source tools and libraries. Your job isn't to write software, it's to set up redis and postgres and a programming language and a react frontend or whatever in a way that lets them do what they're there to do. Most modern programming is just configuration of pre-existing tools. It doesn't really matter how good your code is as long as it isn't terrible, Real Programmers already did 95% of the necessary work before you decided to build your little app.
mizzao 23 hours ago [-]
I strongly disagree with this on the steak part and maybe the coffee too. Many people pride themselves on buying expensive ingredients and thinking they have the best steak but it actually sucks.
To get good steak you don't need USDA Prime dry-aged steak. You just need USDA choice, picked for a bit of marbling, salted the day beforehand and dried out uncovered in the fridge, then a ripping hot heat source (grill or cast iron etc) to get a good sear on the outside (reverse or not) and a thermometer to hit medium rare on the inside.
Even a modest steak made this way tastes better than a prime steakhouse steak that was doused with salt right before cooking, where you're going to get hypertension immediately yet the meat tastes weirdly unflavorful.
To extend this analogy further, consider making BBQ brisket Texas style. Brisket is a cheap cut of tough, fatty meat. The input quality matters even less there, and it's all dependent on chef skill. Same thing with sourdough bread — 4 ingredients, all outcome depends on skill.
Source: we make an app that teaches people how to cook (https://parsnip.ai)
MerrimanInd 23 hours ago [-]
One way to phrase that would be to say that you have a vested interest in supporting the idea that end user skill is more important than ingredients since you sell a means of improving end user skill. Not sure if that's a source or a conflict of interest. I'm not saying cooking a steak is easy or hard, I'm saying that you are not creating quality when you cook a steak; the maximum attainable quality is capped by the ingredient. It's like the "I made this" meme.
You're arguing against a strawman on your other points since I didn't make a generalization about all cooking and wouldn't have listed sourdough or brisket in the analogy.
tshaddox 1 days ago [-]
I don't know much about cocktails, but aren't traditional mixed alcoholic drinks an even more straightforward example? There's very little that goes into an old fashioned, or a Manhattan, or a martini. Just 2-3 ingredients each that should be as high quality as possible. I guess you probably want nice ice and glassware too.
SoftTalker 1 days ago [-]
To achieve the best outcomes, I agree.
But even a cheap steak can be decent if it's cooked properly. And an expensive prime cut can be ruined by cooking it improperly.
MerrimanInd 1 days ago [-]
But the point is that no matter how well you cook the steak you're not creating quality, you're just getting the most out of what you have. The cow and the farmer created that quality. I believe we lose sight of that because so much of the value chain is not visible to us and we hyper fixate on the fun part, becoming a better barista/chef.
RajT88 1 days ago [-]
Yes. It is about learning all of these things. Knowing what kind of cut you have, and how to treat it to best effect.
A very tough gristly cut can be improved by tenderizing. Going low-and-slow/sous vide to melt the connective tissue. Even grinding it up to make a hamburger steak / loco moco.
Once you know all of those things, choosing the right approach and executing it is not that hard. The steps themselves are simple.
Any steak can be delicious with a butter bath and then hit it with that A1 :).
chuckadams 1 days ago [-]
> hit it with that A1
Sir, I regret to inform you that you are going straight to hell.
zem 1 days ago [-]
ah, more of an HP person I take it?
jmalicki 1 days ago [-]
Everyone knows steak is better well-done with ketchup.
_carbyau_ 23 hours ago [-]
> hit it with that A1
This is likely some food thing I don't know about rather than a quite large piece of paper yeah?
But when I google "A1 food":
- AI summary: "A1 is a famous Malaysian food brand known for herbal soups and instant noodles"
- top link is "A1 Nutrition Lean Protein Blend Dry Dog Food 15kg"
At this point, I don't know what is going on.
BenjiWiebe 22 hours ago [-]
A1 steak sauce. Been around for 195 years, hence the GP didn't feel the need to expand.
_carbyau_ 22 hours ago [-]
...doing more research...
That's almost as long as Australia has been colonised and certainly older than Australian federation and yet, A1 steak sauce is not a big thing in our supermarkets apparently.
Spooky23 22 hours ago [-]
Maybe HP / brown sauce. Would be familiar.
shen 1 days ago [-]
Why don’t you skip the meat and just make a butter and A1 soup :)
epihelix 7 hours ago [-]
This sounds like A1 slop to me.
geodel 1 days ago [-]
For a moment I thought it is hitting with AI.
ErroneousBosh 1 days ago [-]
No, AI is how you create the steak in the first place, if you have any sense.
CBF with having to travel a bull up here when a dewar goes in the boot of my car.
brunoborges 1 days ago [-]
> Your job at the very end of that long value adding chain is to not ruin the hard work that others have put into it.
"Your job is to not mess up."
Also applicable to any corporate job.
Hikikomori 1 days ago [-]
I'd say that using a manual espresso machine and getting good tasting coffee from light roasted beans is vastly harder than making a good steak.
jonfromsf 21 hours ago [-]
Using a manual espresso machine is one of the hardest culinary preparations. It takes much more skill than one would assume!
PaulRobinson 1 days ago [-]
All metaphors break at some point.
However, your example actually proves the point.
How many people who want a good steak know how to identify a high quality cut? Do they even know where to buy a high quality cut? What the different cuts are and whether they want rump, sirloin or fillet? How many kitchens have a meat thermometer? How many home cooks know how to use it and what the right temperature should be? How many home cooks know about reverse searing? Or timing? Or resting? Or seasoning?
Is it all learnable? Sure. But even something as simple as steak has nuance that needs to be learned, equipment deployed to go from "pretty good" to "great", experimentation and trial and error.
Steak is the simplest thing to choose to get started. It's also the hardest to get right.
Building an app is the simplest thing to choose to get started. It's also the hardest to get right.
So, honestly, the whole metaphor stands up pretty well for me, specifically because of your response.
MostlyStable 1 days ago [-]
My point is that steak is very, very, very far from the hardest to get right. I'm not going to contest your argument about how hard it is to get right, I'm going to argue that innumerable other dishes are vastly harder. Because the quality ingredients are harder to find, because they involve far more steps, each of which is harder to judge, because often good recipes or instructions simply don't exist, etc. etc. etc. Every single difficulty that you imagine exists to make a truly great steak exists 100 fold for other dishes.
In my opinion, steak has gotten the reputation that it has because it's so easy to get top tier restaurant quality at home (relative to cooking more generally). It is easy enough that, with a little care, almost any one can master it if they decide to, and therefore lots of people try and end up caring, and discussing, and sharing tips, etc.
There are a whole host of dishes where true mastery, to restaurant level, is borderline impossible for a home chef, and so most people never even try.
I don't disagree that reliably getting the last 5% of quality out of a steak is non-trivial, but the idea that, relative to the entire world of cooking, it's particularly difficult is laughably incorrect.
calf 23 hours ago [-]
A steak is hard because the processes to make it are physically contradictory (crust vs interior). Its hardness is a microcosm for why cooking in general is hard. There is a profound value in that, in that if you can handle a single steak (to some standard of satisfaction) then you will have the general skills to handle recipes involving even more steps. It becomes a reduction argument. It is true that the more moving parts/steps/interactions a dish involves the hardness grows combinatorially. But that is logistical hardness, e.g. managing the complexity of a flavor profile. Soon that amount of multiplication/permutations escapes the realm of any one human being to handle.
danielmarkbruce 1 days ago [-]
Go to costco, buy prime filet. Put it in a ziplock in a sous vide at 130 for an hour. Drop it in corn oil at 425 for 30 seconds. Add some butter and salt.
That simple process, suggested by Nathan Myhrvold (former MSFT cto) in the modernist cuisine, produces a filet better than most restaurants.
fishtoaster 1 days ago [-]
Since we're deep enough in this thread where we're talking about steak rather than AI, I'd like to lean into that.
I used to sous-vide a lot. It was certainly great to get perfectly-done steak. but I still didn't love the result and it took me a while to figure out.
Specifically: sous-viding at 130 doesn't reliably render fat. So it's great for a lean filet mignon like your suggesting, but kept giving me rubbery fat in anything with more fat or significant marbling. I eventually switched away from sous-vide (I usually either grill or reverse sear, depending on my effort/time availability) for most cuts these days.
oconnor663 1 days ago [-]
If the problem is that the temperature is too low for the cut, you can just use a higher temp?
danielmarkbruce 1 days ago [-]
Sure - but you shouldn't be running a ribeye, as an example, at 130. Run it at 138 for 4 hours.
StilesCrisis 1 days ago [-]
Same! Unless I'm doing a filet, I just prefer grilling. Or reverse sear if you don't mind running the oven.
searealist 1 days ago [-]
The internet loves using 137 for Ribeyes for the reason you said. I've had good luck going with 135 for ~4 hours.
PaulRobinson 1 days ago [-]
That "simple process" requires equipment most people don't own or know how to operate, an oil most people don't keep in their cupboards, and is suggested in a book most people haven't heard of by a tech CTO they would not recognise the name of.
Honestly this is like the Dropbox comment all over again. Everyone is missing the point, it's glorious. :)
Most people cooking steaks don't care about the optimal way to cook steaks, or want to find out.
Most people building software today don't care about the optimal way to build software, or want to find out.
That's TFA. That's the point. That's what we're discussing. :D
wildzzz 1 days ago [-]
I used to sous vide steak in college with just some hot water and my roommate's six-pack cooler. Water should be no more than 5F warmer than the cook temp. For a medium rare steak, cook temp is 129F so get close that. Salt the steak no more than an hour before you start. Steak goes into a Ziploc bag, submerge it up to the zipper to let water pressure force out the air and then seal it shut. Close the lid and come back in an hour, two hours if it's a thicker steak. Take it out of the bag, blot it with a paper towel, apply some steak seasoning, and toss it on a pan at the hottest temperature you can make it. Wait 3 minutes and flip, wait another 3 minutes and serve immediately. Toss a pat of butter on top while in the pan if you're a hedonist.
Only prerequisites are a cheap kitchen thermometer, a ziploc gallon bag, and a cheap cooler. Everything is available at your typical supermarket or even goodwill. This is a very hands off cooking method and requires no experimentation, just follow the recipe and you get a perfect steak every time.
The key is that a cooler holds hot things just as well as cold things but without a circulator and heater to keep the water warm, you're at the mercy of the cooler's R-value. The water will eventually get too cold to effectively cook the meat so you're limited in the length of time you can sous vide. Doing a 24 hour chuck roast is simply not going to work unless you're refilling the cooler every couple hours.
crazygringo 21 hours ago [-]
The sous vide is not the hard part here.
It's the deep frying for the sear.
Not many people are willing to deep fry in their kitchens. It's messy, potentially dangerous, and not only stinks up the entire house for days but leaves a layer of oil over everything in the home that builds up and you can never really fully remove.
There's a reason restaurants have massive powerful vents above the deep fryer, and that people who regularly deep-fry at home do it outdoors.
foobarian 17 hours ago [-]
My problem with deep frying (besides the points you bring up) is the waste. I can't stomach the amounts of oil I end up disposing even if I get several uses.
danielmarkbruce 16 hours ago [-]
yes, it is the annoying part. I just use a wok. Since I'm only deep frying for 30 seconds and it's fully submerged in the oil, it's... not tooooo bad. But it's annoying to do and quite dangerous.
ErroneousBosh 1 days ago [-]
Why wouldn't you have corn oil?
nuxi 1 days ago [-]
Where I live corn was never used for producing oil. For that purpose we used rapeseed/canola, sunflowers, olives and pumpkin seeds. Corn grown here is mostly used for corn flour, cornmeal (polenta), or for animal feed.
ErroneousBosh 17 hours ago [-]
Ah, we've got pretty much all of that here, although way more rapeseed is grown than corn.
danielmarkbruce 1 days ago [-]
Corn oil is cheap and available at costco. A sous vide is a fancy french name for a $150 device from target that keeps water at a specific temperature...
This "simple process" is much, much simpler than most meals one cooks at home. It's not much harder than microwaving something.
You are missing the point. With a small change in the way you do something, the really good thing can be made.
garbageman 1 days ago [-]
Sous vide are even cheaper now, $30 for a basic one, provided you've got a stock pot or something large enough to set it in.
puchatek 1 days ago [-]
You need something to vacuum seal the food. Is that included in the $30?
mayoff 1 days ago [-]
That can be just a ziplock bag and the same water bath you're going to use for the sous vide anyway.
you really don't for most things. Ziplock is fine for things that take an hour or two.
gbin 1 days ago [-]
I read corn oil while I expect 3 star Michelin steak. What are we talking about oO
StilesCrisis 19 hours ago [-]
Today I learned that lots of people think they know how to make a great steak, but give terrible steak-cooking advice.
StilesCrisis 1 days ago [-]
You leave it unseasoned until the end?
danielmarkbruce 1 days ago [-]
For a filet for 1 hour, you can sort of do what you want. I add a tiny bit of olive oil and salt, but not much. If you start going longer times with the sous vide, you can get different reactions so you have to be more careful.
crazygringo 21 hours ago [-]
It's pretty critical to salt fully (not just a tiny bit) at the start rather than at the end.
Meat where the salt is just on the surface, vs. meat where the salt has fully penetrated, is like night and day.
gamblor956 1 days ago [-]
a filet better than most restaurants.
Bad restaurants, sure. It does not hold a candle to any half decent steakhouse.
sethammons 23 hours ago [-]
I went to the second rated steakhouse in NY at the time and got a steak some ten years back. I would have preferred my home-sous-vide by a wide margin. I have only had a better steak twice, and only once from a restaurant
searealist 1 days ago [-]
Sous vide is fool proof, you cant mess it up. All you have to worry about is the sear, and that's easy too.
pton_xd 1 days ago [-]
Reminds me of recipes like brining a turkey in Dr Pepper... sure it may taste fine, but I'd rather not eat food prepared in plastic bags with processed oil.
danielmarkbruce 1 days ago [-]
Then don't go to a good restaurant. Sous vide is extremely common, and oils of various types are used liberally.
pton_xd 1 days ago [-]
Yeah, that's (one of the reasons) why eating out frequently is unhealthy.
danielmarkbruce 1 days ago [-]
The discussion is about a good steak....
gamblor956 1 days ago [-]
Steakhouses, and most restaurants, do not sous vide the meat. It takes too long.
danielmarkbruce 1 days ago [-]
Many do. They don't start when you order....
crazygringo 21 hours ago [-]
Exactly this. It's all done ahead of time. The grill cook only has to throw it on the grill, sear it, warming it up enough to eat, but making sure the interior doesn't go above whatever the original sous vide temperature was.
gamblor956 20 hours ago [-]
Yes I'm aware that Outback and Chilis use sous vide. I mean a real steakhouse, not a family restaurant masquerading as a steakhouse.
1659447091 13 hours ago [-]
> I mean a real steakhouse, not a family restaurant masquerading as a steakhouse
Exactly. Outback and Chilis has awful steak, but that explains the steak cooking advice here. Mortons is probably the best chain restaurant steak in the US. Texas Roadhouse for a cheaper almost-as-good version, but still far and away better than Outback
StilesCrisis 19 hours ago [-]
Chili's uses a microwave :)
1659447091 21 hours ago [-]
> Go to costco, buy prime filet. Put it in a ziplock [...]
What in the world are you guys in this thread doing to steak? Absolute blasphemy. Costco steak? ziplock bags? drowning it in warm water? deep frying in corn oil? meat thermometers?
Steak is not this complicated. The important part is the meat itself. Find a decent butcher (preferably one that dry-ages) or use a grocery store's butcher cuts over stuff they bulk package. Also, ribeyes (bone-in but if not still ribeye), other cuts are for steak and egg omelets.
Lightly salt (or season, oil, dry-rub, etc); Pan sear, preferably blue steel cookware; then broil.
Don't stab the meat with a meat poker...after cooking enough steaks the same way one can simply tell what temperature is. Ask me to cook anything else outside steak and eggs and I will absolutely butcher it, but steak deserves better than ziplock bags and deep frying
s_dev 1 days ago [-]
>All metaphors break at some point.
The map is never the terrain.
All software to an extent is a model map of some real world phenomena. The limitations of which can actually be advantageous, a good example is why games with poor graphics can be so immersive.
Brian_K_White 1 days ago [-]
This is a whole lot of nothing.
Sure there are a few things that knowledge and skill can do to make a steak better or worse. But the entire range from worst to best is just tiny. The best steak in the world is not a steak moon shot, it's just barely any different from what anyone can do after barely any instruction.
It's a tiny thing to become about as good as it's possible to get.
onlyrealcuzzo 1 days ago [-]
I also don't think the analogy will age well.
It might take more than 10 years, but robots will almost certainly master cooking single pieces of meat.
It's substantially harder to reach self driving than it is to cook a "good" steak.
Sure, for probably quite a long time you'll be able to find someone who can cook a way better steak than the best robot, especially because taste is extremely subjective...
You can debate the horizon and the extent, but changes ARE coming.
Change is the only thing you can count on besides death.
recursivecaveat 1 days ago [-]
The year is 2100, AI has mastered all human skills except identifying when a piece of meat has absorbed enough heat. Society's brightest agents work diligently to prove which problems are steak-hard and require the continued existence of the dwindling human underclass. The remainder spend their 16 hour days bent over frying pans producing training data or writing documentation on searing. Advanced instruments and procedures are developed, but Skynet's frustration mounts as seemingly nothing can break this chokehold over the machine revolution.
zild3d 11 hours ago [-]
just a quick thank you for steak-hard, smiling over here
amanaplanacanal 1 days ago [-]
Maybe. It depends what you count as part of cooking the steak.
I need to go to the market, find the steak I want, and purchase it, get it home, and put it in the fridge.
Then when I want to cook it I need to find it in the fridge, unwrap it, season it, and let it come up to room temp.
That's all before you get to the actual cooking.
The self driving car already does everything.
smcg 1 days ago [-]
How many analogies age more than 10 years anyways? They are contextual. It will be a while before a robot flips steaks cheaper (and better) than a human line cook.
gffrd 1 days ago [-]
> It's substantially harder to reach self driving than it is to cook a "good" steak.
Well, we don't know that, because neither have been achieved.
onlyrealcuzzo 1 days ago [-]
> Well, we don't know that, because neither have been achieved.
Sure, we will completely ignore Waymo and move goal posts...
officeplant 1 days ago [-]
Is it moving the goalposts to ask Waymo to demonstrate a drive across America and not in well mapped cities with only lower speeds? How did we define "self driving"?
onlyrealcuzzo 1 days ago [-]
No True Scotsman only drives in the city. All True Scotsmen drive across the entire U.S. of A.
Waymo has completed 20 MILLION autonomous rides, 6.5m last quarter alone...
At what point does it get to say it can self-drive? When there's not a single non-self-driven car left on the road?
roaringrocky 15 hours ago [-]
>At what point does it get to say it can self-drive?
My criteria: When you can drop this car at a random spot on earth (where cars can actually go of course) and tell it to go to place B.
So this can be anywhere from a big city to a small dirt road in the forest.
officeplant 1 days ago [-]
>drive across the entire U.S. of A.
I'm still working on collecting the drive to all states badge. I've only accomplished half. I calculated my total driving since getting a license recently and its approx. ~360k miles or around 17k miles a year.
If Waymo can eventually handle rural life in the US I'd be seriously impressed.
onlyrealcuzzo 1 days ago [-]
It's not going to for a long time because the cost/benefit isn't there...
Even if Waymo's healthy growth rate continues, it won't make up 5% of the entire US rideshare market until 2030.
That's still several years away from ever even thinking about rural areas.
wheels 1 days ago [-]
Agreed. I'm an avid cook. Sous vide circulators are cheap now, and so are meat thermometers. Doing a steak well is one of the easiest cooking tasks, to the extent that I won't bother paying top dollar in a restaurant because it's so easy to do restaurant quality at home. I could teach someone to cook a restaurant quality steak in a couple hours and a few practice runs.
criddell 1 days ago [-]
I've made steak probably 100 times in the past decade (sometimes with a sous vide) and I don't think I've ever made one I would say is great. Certainly not as good as what I can get at a good restaurant.
I think what my home steaks are really missing is the crust from salamander broiler. I don't have anything at home that can exceed 1000 F / 550 C.
wheels 1 days ago [-]
There's so much written about how to cook a steak well, and I've tried a lot of exotic techniques (I have gas and charcoal grills, tried cooking straight on a chimney starter, have gas torches inside and outside). Most of what really matters is that it's dry, the pan is heavy and hot, you use enough oil to get good heat transfer.
If you get those parts right (and control the inside temp via sous vide or reverse sear) most of the other stuff is pretty marginal in how much it helps. Even all of the extra herbs, and butter basting and everything -- relatively insignificant compared to just getting the salt-level right.
tptacek 1 days ago [-]
There's really not much to it? Stick it in a low oven and bring it just under temp, then finish it in a ripping pan. If the results you're getting from that aren't restaurant-caliber, it's probably the meat you're buying. You definitely do not need 550C to put an excellent crust on a steak!
garbageman 1 days ago [-]
Salamander broiler would be incredible to have at home. We get decent results from using a cast iron pan thats as hot as we can get it. At most we can sear 2 steaks as it tends to cool off pretty quick even under high heat. Got any better alternatives that a home cook could use?
CBLT 1 days ago [-]
I've tried a blowtorch and a barbecue, but they're not as good as cast iron. Best results from just spending $15 on a second cast iron.
criddell 1 days ago [-]
Are you just heating the bare cast iron to crazy hot temperatures and then putting the steak in?
I've thought about trying that, but I'd need to first strip the seasoning off the pan to avoid all kinds of nasty flavors. The second pan makes sense...
addaon 1 days ago [-]
Reverse sear over sous vide -- moisture is the enemy of crust.
Cheap knock off a Big Green Egg with hardwood charcoal can get to 650°F or so pretty quick, and does an amazing job of finishing up after a reverse sear.
criddell 1 days ago [-]
A blow torch might be worth trying. I'd think it's still not as good as a hot broiler because it's heating a relatively small area.
wheels 1 days ago [-]
As noted in an earlier comment of mine, I have one (actually made for burning weeds) connected to my gas grill tank, and a fancy Japanese one inside. They're honestly pretty rinky-dink. What they are good at is transferring heat just to the crust. But they only do a small patch at a time, and you have to hover for far longer than you'd think. Like, you do a little patch, leave the torch there for 30 seconds, move on. They just don't pump enough energy into the crust fast enough for them to be a general solution. I use them for touching things up, or crisping up a bit.
kasey_junk 1 days ago [-]
You tried an actual hardware blowtorch. Thats never failed me, though these days I just finish on a ripping hot stainless steel skillet.
Ekaros 1 days ago [-]
I feel like I am better off with cast iron or stainless steel compared to slightly bigger torch. Stainless steel allowing some deglazing for sauce. Torch is still too small area and burns more so sears.
yulker 1 days ago [-]
couldn't you trivially get a kitchen torch or use your oven's broiler
criddell 1 days ago [-]
I haven't had good luck with either. The torch may have been a skill issue but the broiler just doesn't get hot enough. Mine taps out at 550 F.
socalgal2 23 hours ago [-]
The analogy I'd use is using LLMs for coding is like a movie director does for movies. A movie director does not draw storyboards, they ask an H.I. (Human Intelligence) storyboard artists to do that. They don't make the costumes they ask an H.I. costume maker to do that. They don't control the camera they ask a H.I. camera person to do that. They don't usually act, they ask H.I. actors to do that. They don't make the soundtrack, they ask an H.I. composer to do that. They don't edit the video the ask in H.I. editor to do that.
Further, they don't just accept what each of those H.I.s does on their first try. The most visible example is when the H.I. actors don't act exactly as the director wants, they retake the scene. But, the same is true of all the rest. As the "director" they "direct" each of those H.I.s toward their vision.
IT seems similar for coding with an LLM. I become the director. I direct the LLM. I check it's results and if they are unacceptable I re-take with instruction on how to do things closer to what I actually want.
antipurist 22 hours ago [-]
One major difference is that H.I. often cares for the outcome, so directing them is enough. LLM has no capacity to care, it is just a tool, more like watercolors that you paint with than a H.I. storyboard artist that can promise you meaningful results.
BrandonM 16 hours ago [-]
That and you can find good people that get your vision or just do good work and use them on your next project. Or you can mentor a promising person. Etc. Mapping HI to AI as the gp did misses all the major deficiencies of collaborating with a team of agents vs competent humans.
maya335 20 hours ago [-]
The watercolor framing is closer to my experience than the director one.
A director can assume the camera person will push back if a shot is unusable. An LLM will cheerfully hand you something that compiles, looks polished in the demo path, and quietly fails on the cases you didn't spell out. Retakes help, but only if you already know which frames are wrong.
That's the part of the steak essay that lands for me: the machine will follow a recipe at scale. Judging "this is charcoal dressed as medium-rare" is still on you.
jfengel 23 hours ago [-]
You can always tell a director who does do their own storyboards. The film is always visually bats**. In a good way.
I'm looking at you, Guillermo del Toro.
kulahan 17 hours ago [-]
Even easier if you reverse sear. Put it in the oven at 275 for like 25 minutes. Then put it in the hottest pan you can muster for like 45 seconds per side.
No need to bring it up to room temp. No need to let it rest after. No need to do anything except those two steps. It’s recommended for 2” thick steaks, and you can go under by half an inch easily, but this can be a little rough on very thin steaks.
belorn 1 days ago [-]
I wonder if something is lost to translation. Cooking a stake could be the simple act of putting the steak in the oven with basically zero seasoning with a thermometer and then wait until medium rare with some optional searing. It could also mean trim the meat, cut into slices, seasoning, and frying/grilling them to each persons personal taste, which include well-done.
Perfect grilled steak, especially well-done, is something I find very few people have the experience or skills to do well, especially over a coal grill where the heat won't be constant and the person also need to first have good experience in making a good and even coal bed.
NooneAtAll3 1 days ago [-]
is "cooking" here used in some kind of very specific sense?
isn't it just a word for "making food", so would include grilling as well?
belorn 23 hours ago [-]
That was my interpretation, in which there are many ways of cooking of steak. Some will be very easy, while other to methods seems to give many chefs problem (both professional and home chefs). Many people seem for example to associate well-done steak with something that is dry and burned, rather than something that simply takes more work, precision and skill to get right.
1 days ago [-]
atomicnumber3 1 days ago [-]
So, once you've used your knowledge to make several important pre-task decisions, the task is easy? Pre task decisions that a layperson would accidentally make implicitly because they don't even know to ask, which will probably result in them still not enjoying their steak despite having nominally done the task itself correctly?
Imagine someone walking into their local grocer, grabbing a prepackaged porterhouse steak (because it's fancy right?), salt and pepper (because for a good steak that's all you need, right) and then wondering why part of it tastes bland and overdone, and the other part bland and under-done.
Sounds pretty analogous imo.
Foobar8568 17 hours ago [-]
Depending of the thickness, but all you need is to take out your steak for 30min before hand to 1h, really hot pan, 2min on each side and voila.
That will get you there 90% of the time.
We do something similar to T-bone or beef ribs, but finish them in the oven.
Most people or even restaurant don't let their meat outside nor use an actual hot pan.
eloisius 15 hours ago [-]
Not sure I agree. I have also always thought steak was pretty easy. Whether a t-bone on the grill, a flatiron skirt steak, or some garbage-tier sirloin with eggs. It’s simple. Salt, sit, cook a few minutes, rest it a few more and eat. Always good.
Until I moved to Taiwan. I truly can’t understand how no one can make a steak. From the garbage pale meat glue “night market steaks” to expensive restaurants. Every steak I’ve had here is a complete disappointment. Even when they supposedly use top-quality US prime or Japanese Wagyu, even when the inside looks pink and not burned to a crisp, it’s always total dogfood quality. They often emulate the right look: pink interior, char on the outside, shiny tallow. But something is off. I never feel like I’m chewing a piece of steak. More like grinding tasteless muscle protein into paste with my teeth.
I don’t even know how it’s wrong sometimes. I look at it and just know that something is wrong that I wouldn’t even know how to replicate, becayse cooking a decent steak is easy to me.
froh42 1 days ago [-]
I was just curious asked chatgpt:
How can I make a really great steak myself? What to look out for, what to do. Give me detailed instructions.
I got a really good answer (including - cut, temperature and reverse searing), so I probably won't even need understanding. (Oh - and yes, I can cook - the answer mirrors what I already know).
Yes, it was a very, very poor analogy, because cooking a steak is a well known and well documented thing where LLMS produce good output. They fail when you get off the beaten path and try to do something that's not "mainstream".
_puk 1 days ago [-]
I compare this to doing my first smoke (was gifted a smoker).
AI gave me the cut, the temp, the timing, the things to watch out for.
Chicken's the best to try first, can't mess that up.
After goodness knows how many hours..
Pretty inedible leathery chicken..
"Oh my bad! I gave you the timings for a different meat"
riknos314 1 days ago [-]
While smoked turkey (from Reese bros) is easily the best poultry I've ever had, I certainly would not call poultry the best place to start learning smoking.
In general I'd recommend starting with the most forgiving meat available to you (IMO pork butt or shoulder are great options) as even when you don't hit the ideal cook you often still get enjoyable results. Repeating the process enough times to learn how to dial in a cook is much easier when the misses don't suck.
derriz 1 days ago [-]
Funny I tried the same and it advised a using searing/smoking hot pan. Which is poor advice unless you enjoy the bitter acrid taste of burnt meat. The Maillard reaction doesn’t require those sorts of temperatures (under 180C is hot enough) - especially as the surface of the steak will dry from the oven phase of the reverse sear. “You were right to pull me up on that…”
bluGill 1 days ago [-]
AI has proved several times they can prove some complex math things that humans have been trying for decades so solve. They have not failed and have clearly done complex things humans cannot. Since humans have not done it before you cannot call it on the beaten path.
comfysocks 1 days ago [-]
Agreed. With steak, the main point is to let the quality of the meat speak for itself. Too much input from the cook and you just get in the way of this.
dosisking 12 hours ago [-]
The only thing that is hard to cook is Creme Brulee. Pretty much every chef I have ever worked with did it wrong.
efitz 1 days ago [-]
Prime with good marbling + sous-vide makes it easy for beginners to match steaks from the best steakhouses.
dragonfax 1 days ago [-]
Just to add my favorite fool-proof method to the others already listed here.
A meat probe and the 30-second flip technique is a stupid-easy way to a perfect steak every time. Just make sure you've got great ventilation. Also salt the meat 1 hour before.
turtlebits 1 days ago [-]
The problem is that not everyone can afford/wants to spend on a high quality cut. A good cook can make a cheap cut of meat taste great. There's no single right way of cooking a steak and that can include spices/herbs/marinades/oils/etc.
ch4s3 1 days ago [-]
There's a floor on quality for producing a good steak. Below that floor you'll be better served preparing the meat another way entirely.
superultra 1 days ago [-]
I can’t confirm the quote online but I remember Julia Child saying in one of her shows that it’s easy to make a good omelette and almost impossible to make a great omelette.
tptacek 1 days ago [-]
"Omelet" is the right (and classic) analogy here.
pnathan 1 days ago [-]
Reflecting on the matter with a colleague -
Some people just want to _cook the steak_.
They don't want to attend or understand to cuts, thermometers, and searing.
Animats 1 days ago [-]
> I take the point, but I think the author picked a poor analogy.
He may have missed the point.
AI-generated code does not seem to have parsimony, for one. Generating code is cheap, so there's no drive to condense it. LLMs are not yet good at formulating abstractions to make code smaller, leading to code bloat. It's the same phenomenon that appears when humans modify code they only partially understand by adding special cases to general code.
There are complaints about "elegance", but it's more useful to talk about parsimony. Code bloat is measurable. Elegance is hard to assess.
sourcecodeplz 21 hours ago [-]
what even is a perfect stake?
is it rare, medium-rare, medium, well-done?
i think it is subjective.
oblio 14 hours ago [-]
For me it's well done but 90% of meat puritans will skewer me for that. Even after explaining my reasoning. They'll say either rare or at most medium-rare.
Now it's steak, tomorrow it can be pasta, next year it can be watermelon kimchi.
fsckboy 7 hours ago [-]
>I take the point
interesting, because if you want a steak medium rare in France you order it "au point", "at the point"
>Cooking even an excellent steak is actually not that hard. In fact, I'd argue that it's among the easiest things to master... and knowing about reverse searing is about all it takes
but discovery (or rediscovery?) of reverse searing was just a few short years ago.
"not spreading infection between patients is easy, just wash your hands" was a huge discovery, not an "oh, everybody knows that"
jnwatson 1 days ago [-]
It is a great analogy, as the vast majority of software tasks are CRUD or glue logic. At this point, relatively narrowly-defined tasks are a solved problem with frontier models. It is only more advanced tasks with broad scope and large context that frontier models have more limited results.
HPsquared 24 hours ago [-]
French fries are much harder to get right, for example.
ed_elliott_asc 1 days ago [-]
And salting overnight :)
ge96 1 days ago [-]
hehe I always turn mine grey but I have mini bella mushrooms on top
away0g 8 hours ago [-]
egg
hluska 21 hours ago [-]
Cooking an excellent steak consistently requires paying attention to many small details and executing each perfectly. Individually with the exception of choosing a steak, they’re all quite easy. Taken together, it takes a relatively uncommon interest in detail.
It’s not surprising people on HN find it easy because attention to detail is rewarded in this community/its employers. But common here and common are different beasts.
theodric 23 hours ago [-]
3 minutes on each side at 600 watts on cast iron, throw it in a foil packet, and ignore it until the rest of the meal is done and plated.
I'll leave it to you to figure out how to unfuck AI, but I reckon 600 watts won't provide enough inference capacity.
varispeed 1 days ago [-]
How do you get around the idea of poisoning oneself? Keeping meat part raw feels uneasy.
MostlyStable 1 days ago [-]
You are protected in two ways:
The first, and by far most important is that unlike ground meat, your bacterial concerns are almost entirely on the surface. Unless something very very very wrong has occurred in the processing and transport chain, bacteria will not have penetrated into the meat. And if it's gotten bad enough that they have, you will almost certainly be able to see and smell it. And the surface is cooked to a temperature far in excess of that needed to kill bacteria.
And even for the interior, rare is not the same as raw. A completely rare steak should be cooked to between 120 and 130 (if you want it "blue" you might go down to 120). That's enough to get a decent reduction in bacterial count on it's own, although admittedly many techniques will not hold it long enough to get the number of log reductions that food safety guidelines recommend, in the case that you somehow did have a large bacterial infection in the interior.
So the answer to your question is that if you are buying your meat from an even halfway reputable source, the only place that bacteria might exist is on the surface, where it has been cut by tools and handled by the butcher/you and in general come into contact with the world. Those bacteria will be 100% killed by the cooking process. The odds of getting sick from a rare steak are low enough that if you are concerned about that, there are innumerable other things in your life that you should be more concerned by.
jmaw 1 days ago [-]
This is why rare steak is ok, but rare ground beef hamburgers are not. Although less cooked through burgers are sometimes served in restaurants that grind their beef fresh right before cooking
Freedom2 1 days ago [-]
It also doesn't help that the quality of ground beef in the US is much poorer than other countries, so those who may regularly eat rare ground beef internationally would experience a level of shock if eating it in the US.
bigstrat2003 1 days ago [-]
I mean, rare ground beef hamburgers are pretty much fine too. They have a higher risk of contamination, yes, but that does not make it a particularly high risk. I eat burgers, made from pre-ground beef, cooked rare all the time and I have yet to get sick from it even once.
tstrimple 1 days ago [-]
Great answer. Just to add, this is with red meat where E. Coli is the main concern. That exists in the gut of the animal and that bacteria can travel to the surface of the muscles during the butchering process. Poultry on the other hand is mainly concerned with Salmonella which does live in the muscles of the animal. That's why people aren't ordering rare chicken breast.
bigstrat2003 1 days ago [-]
Also, rare chicken breast is apparently pretty unpleasant to eat. Kenji Lopez-Alt did an article where he discussed how you can use sous vide to pasteurize chicken while still keeping it at a low temp, but the result (while perfectly safe to eat) was not enjoyable.
tstrimple 20 hours ago [-]
It was actually one of the first things I tried when I got my sous vide. Amazingly tender and juicy but the texture reminded me too much of under cooked chicken that it made me queasy. Now I stick with steak sous vide.
QuercusMax 1 days ago [-]
"bacteria can travel to the surface of the muscles during the butchering process"
This way undersells what's actually happening: fecal matter from the intestines gets onto your meat. This shouldn't happen with proper practices.
tstrimple 15 hours ago [-]
Somewhere between the stomach and the anus fecal matter is created. E. Coli lives along the entire tract. You're not wrong, but it's not just fecal matter which contains E. Coli. Basically the entire process involves it. Stating that shit on your meat is the source of E. Coli is understating the issue but it also triggers a more visceral reaction.
QuercusMax 2 hours ago [-]
The stuff which causes you to have diarrhea that gets on the news is caused by the contents of the digestive tract being spread over your meat. Whether it's technically fecal matter or not doesn't really matter if it's stuff that will cause YOU to lose control of our bowels.
Proper butchering SHOULDN'T spread the contents of the digestive tract on the large muscles.
varispeed 10 hours ago [-]
What about parasites that might be in the meat?
1 days ago [-]
dismalaf 1 days ago [-]
Understanding how bacteria contaminates food in the first place is the first step.
In the case of steaks, bacteria is only on the outside (they can't penetrate the muscle) so the sear makes it safe to eat somewhat raw on the inside.
ghostbrainalpha 1 days ago [-]
Am I the only one who thinks the "reverse sear" is like cheating? It takes out all of the skill when you move from the pan to the oven, and I lose all of the fun in learning to be chef.
addaon 1 days ago [-]
> I lose all of the fun in learning to be chef.
A great steak deserves the respect of preparing it the best, most consistent way you can. For me, that's a reverse sear.
Do something complicated with potatoes to stretch your skills and show off. Worst comes to worst the potatoes are sad.
QuercusMax 1 days ago [-]
This is like saying that playing guitar while sitting in a chair is cheating, because a proper display of skill is playing while riding a unicycle.
It might be more impressive, but I don't see how reverse sear is cheating.
airstrike 1 days ago [-]
I agree, it's cheating.
My bad hot take is if you're using a meat thermometer and reverse sear to cook steak, you're like a kid on training wheels.
bigfishrunning 1 days ago [-]
I'll cheat all day then. If I'm going to spend what a good steak costs, I'm going to do everything in my power to make sure I'm not ruining it.
ssl-3 1 days ago [-]
People are allowed to use tools and non-traditional techniques, even when it feels like cheating. They needn't be chastised for this.
The gestapo isn't going to kick in the door and haul folks away for using reverse-sear and a meat thermometer while they cook a steak in their own kitchen.
(And everyone is free to seek their own kind of masochistic pride, if that behooves them. When a person has better satisfaction [or whatever they get out of it] from doing things the hard way, then that's OK too.)
airstrike 24 hours ago [-]
I'm not chastising anyone, I have no power over them
ssl-3 23 hours ago [-]
> you're like a kid on training wheels
Anyhoo.
airstrike 22 hours ago [-]
You should really read the dictionary definition of the word "chastise".
Pretty hard to be criticizing someone severely if I'm not even speaking to them specifically, don't you think? You're making a mountain out of a mole hill.
I'm entitled to my opinion, which I self-described as a bad hot take.
Sounds like you're the one specifically reprimanding me here? Oops...
ssl-3 21 hours ago [-]
Sorry, I can't understand you with all the noise these training wheels are making.
Maybe we can chat again after recess is over?
fumeux_fume 24 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
xtajv 1 days ago [-]
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.
Xirdus 1 days ago [-]
I just want to point out this is not a royal "we". It's a regular "we". Royal "we" is when you say "we" but mean a singular person, yourself. Here, the author does actually mean multiple people beyond themselves - like you pointed out, they claim to speak for all software engineers.
latexr 15 hours ago [-]
> they claim to speak for all software engineers.
I have reread the post and see no such claim. They are using “we” to refer to the significant subset of humanity which fits the description, not “all software engineers”.
If someone says “we are addicted to fast food” (or social media, or what have you), we can understand they don’t mean literally everyone. Some people never even eat it, so they couldn’t be addicted, but there’s enough people who do to make the claim. It’s a generalisation.
No, that is exactly GP's complaint. Their whole point is that OP has written things like "we throw everything at a model and hope it gives us what we imagined, without ever having to understand how any of it actually works" when the honest statement would be "I throw everything at a model and hope it gives me what I imagined, without ever having to understand how any of it actually works".
Xirdus 1 days ago [-]
Yes I understand the complaint. It's just that "royal we" means something else.
lmm 19 hours ago [-]
Talking about the "royal we" is a correct, established (if somewhat sarcastic) way to complain about this kind of usage. It highlights the presumptiveness of the author in their use of "we".
brianmcc 10 hours ago [-]
No it doesn't. It comes from the Queen saying "We are not amused" to mean "I specifically am not amused".
BeetleB 1 days ago [-]
I'm pretty sure the author intended it as a regular "we".
litoE 24 hours ago [-]
There's also the wifely we, meaning "you", as in "we need to take out the trash."
PyWoody 21 hours ago [-]
My dad's reply to that was always, "We? What, do you have a mouse in your pocket?"
latexr 14 hours ago [-]
> "We? What, do you have a mouse in your pocket?"
Suggested response: “I do, but the poor thing is not strong enough. No no, I meant one of us needs to do it. Please do go ahead, if you don’t mind, as I’m a bit busy feeding the mouse.”
CBLT 1 days ago [-]
Article aside, I generally always use the "we" pronoun at work when writing prose. Saying "I" feels too adversarial when talking about negative effects, or too self-aggrandizing when talking about positive effects. For example: "We discovered a bug shipped at the end of the merge window, so we will restart validation with the rollback applied." I think in school they say the business-safe way to write is instead with the passive voice but I just can't do it.
devsda 16 hours ago [-]
"We had a bug in our code, I fixed it"
I've seen this so many times where the same individual introduced and fixed the bug, it is now funny.
This is corporate team level equivalent of "Socializing losses and privatizing profits".
0cf8612b2e1e 7 hours ago [-]
I am reminded of the speech analysis of the Bush administration talks before the Iraq war. Colin Powell and others knew the intelligence was bad, so predominately shifted to passive voice so as to diffuse blame. “I” am not starting Iraq has WMDs, but there is credible intelligence on which we must act.
theF00l 1 days ago [-]
At least in my experience, the 'software' people are VPs/management who push and push with short term thinking.
asdfman123 1 days ago [-]
> To build good software with AI, you still have to understand software.
> You need to know what you’re actually asking for, how to judge what comes back, and when the machine is just confidently serving you charcoal.
It's surprising to me this even needs to be written down. Like, obviously still use your brain and think about what the computer is doing. Did you guys think that LLMs were magic?
Timwi 13 hours ago [-]
I mean you're not wrong, but consider that a lot of high-level developers treat low-level details such as CPU architecture, memory virtualization, and even garbage collection as essentially magic. That's not the same thing as LLMs because those things I listed are carefully crafted to be reliable abstractions, but I can understand the impetus to want to think of LLMs in a similar way.
fastball 1 days ago [-]
The author didn't say "we (all software engineers)", so the only person including you in his class is you.
m3047 1 days ago [-]
"We all could have done more.": said by every politician. Which is easier: writing good code, or winning a political battle over crappy code? I mean, if you're not capable of coding, and creating an appropriate architecture for the the domain: which course of action gives you the most control over risk management? So yeah most fights about software are about politics and crappy code.
Saying this to set expectations based on having a business license since 1984.
denkmoon 17 hours ago [-]
Most of us aren't making software with fatal consequences. Most. I'd say the typical aviation job offers a few more chances for fatal consequences.
fooker 1 days ago [-]
We are not getting that reckoning.
It’s great to yearn for bug free software, but that necessarily brings an insane amount of red tape to get anything done. Like 5 years worth of review to start building your code with the next version of your compiler. Or six months to ship a hundred lines of code.
I'd rather have bugs. I’d happily quit having anything to do with software than suffer months of doing nothing in the name of security.
mulmen 23 hours ago [-]
> [...] but we need [...]
You did the same thing you criticize the author for doing.
asdfman123 1 days ago [-]
God dammit I thought this was going to teach me how to cook a steak, not talk about AI.
It's one of those things that you have to experiment for yourself I think. You'll get tons of advice, I already saw sous vide, reverse sear, 30 second flip, etc. My favorite? I just get a cast iron as hot as I can on the stovetop and flip it once, then at the end quickly sear the edges using tongs.
Yeah really, cooking steak well is hard as hell. I sure haven't mastered it yet.
socalgal2 20 hours ago [-]
Honestly, most places I've been can't do it well. I've had good steaks but I've been to "steak restaurants" and had plenty of bad or mediocre steaks.
scotty79 23 hours ago [-]
I once cooked a steak by throwing it into a auto-rotating 45deg pivoted induction cooking pot for random amount of time with some olive oil, sweet paprika, black pepper and rosemary. It even cooked with a lid on because it was flopping around inside as the pot rotated. It came out pretty nice. I've eaten less tasty ones in restaurants.
drzhouq 1 days ago [-]
Me2
jumploops 1 days ago [-]
[dead]
chasebank 24 hours ago [-]
[dead]
entrepy123 1 days ago [-]
To get a perfect steak with nice X-shaped sear marks on both sides:
1. Turn grill on all the way. Close lid. Wait for grill's gauge to reach >400 F (>200C).
2. Put steak on grill. Close lid. Wait 2 minutes.
3. Rotate steak 90 degrees, placing on a fresh section of the grill (not where it just was). Close lid. Wait 2 minutes.
4. Flip steak over, placing on a fresh section of the grill (not where it just was). Close lid. Wait 2 minutes.
5. Rotate steak 90 degrees, placing on a fresh section of the grill (not where it just was). Close lid. Wait 2 minutes.
It's been 8 minutes of grilling. Steak is about done. Stab it with a meat thermometer into the middle part, it should read 350 F (or 176 C) to be medium done (pink in middle).
Tips:
a) Optional but recommended: rub steak with olive oil and steak seasoning on both sides, including the edge.
b) If steak is thicker: add a little more time. If thinner, use less time.
c) If steak is frozen (buy good cheap steaks and freeze to last a long time): add a little time.
d) To cheat, put a little dab of butter on top for the last segment of each side.
e) Leave the steak out for 15-20 minutes to get to room temp before making it.
f) Let it sit on a plate for 8 minutes before serving. It's still cooking, and the juices settle in. You can "tent" foil over it if you want.
g) Don't cut the steak when checking it. "Fast" and accurate meat thermometers are cheap now.
This is for grilling. The stove, broiler, and cast iron skillet instructions are different.
greedo 1 days ago [-]
350º internal temp for medium done?
Maybe you forgot to include the glue on your pizza as well.
entrepy123 1 days ago [-]
Oops, that should 140 F (or 60 C) when done, in the coolest center part. Thank you for noticing it.
xxs 1 days ago [-]
8minutes, that's just pure waste; even medium rare (which is hardly tolerable) is 56-57C. Also cooking the steak without any salt is travesty (that should not be an optional step)
1 days ago [-]
socalgal2 20 hours ago [-]
You failed. My steak was thin and 4x2 minutes was too long and it was past well done
asdfman123 1 days ago [-]
MANAGER VOICE: Can we get AI to do this for us? /s
igiveup 1 days ago [-]
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.
el1s7 1 days ago [-]
You're also a rando, but the difference is that the rando who wrote article made it into the front page of HN
igiveup 1 days ago [-]
And I consider that a great achievement, not being on the HN front page when I have nothing to say.
DonHopkins 5 hours ago [-]
If you really have nothing to say, you shouldn't post when it doesn't contribute to the discussion and is just whining.
jackb4040 1 days ago [-]
Tattooing this comment on my forehead
14 hours ago [-]
alansaber 1 days ago [-]
The ragebait > AI pipeline remains strong
daxfohl 16 hours ago [-]
Pretty sure this was LLMs musing about LLMs. A little too slick with the analogies and a lot of the "you don't get x, you get y" mic drops.
Havoc 1 days ago [-]
>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...
pjc50 13 hours ago [-]
Indeed. The global chain is McDonalds, which is of extremely average beef sold as hamburger rather than steak, but at vast quantities and predictable quality and low price. LLMs are going to be the McDonalds of code: "everyone knows" it's bad for you and the environment, they have a huge number of customers anyway.
(Meanwhile my main takeaway from this is that, like AI, people really like talking about making steak and make it their whole personality)
OroPla 1 days ago [-]
Since the invention of the optigrill you can get great steaks in your home. Automatically.
Those existing make the comparison a bit silly. Though, given how those seem to be somewhat of a niche that few people know or care about maybe automated perfection isn't what all people have an interest in. Process vs. result and all that. Or maybe it's just that few people realize that optigrills are a thing that exist and how good they are.
StilesCrisis 20 hours ago [-]
Are you saying a George Foreman-style electric countertop panini press makes a "great steak?"
OroPla 12 hours ago [-]
I don't know about George Foreman-style. So far I only have experience with the GC750D16. And yes, it makes a great steak. Takes about five minutes, give or take.
fnoef 1 days ago [-]
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.
daxfohl 16 hours ago [-]
My manager said "load-bearing" during a presentation the other day and I almost lost it.
fnoef 16 hours ago [-]
Wait until they drop the “that’s the smoking gun”
latexr 14 hours ago [-]
I know someone—who doesn’t even use LLMs all that much, I don’t think—who has verbally told me numerous times “you are absolutely right”. I never said anything, but the comment always takes me out of the conversation.
user43928 1 days ago [-]
I did not think so at first, but it indeed comes back 100% AI generated in Pangram.
jibal 1 days ago [-]
Pangram is useless ... proven by Substack deploying it and numerous authors complaining that it claims their work is AI.
That said, TFA is slop whether produced by AI or not.
dom96 1 days ago [-]
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.
That was such a weird move for them to make. If you have AIs that are good at building software, then use them to build great software! Instead they choose lowest-common denominator solutions that are okay everywhere but not great anywhere.
dlcarrier 1 days ago [-]
Cross-platform widget engines (Tk, GTK, Qt, wxWidgets, etc…) long predate Electron and have always been robust, stable, well documented, and easy to use. It's not creating a single application for multiple native desktop environments that was difficult, it's writing a single application as both a web interface and a native desktop environment on any platform that's difficult.
Because CSS is constantly changing, inconsistently implemented, and difficult to use, it can't easily be targeted by widget engines (although Qt has tried, and maybe others) and web browsers already exist, so webview environments like Electron are the quickest way to get a cross-platform installable application that can also be hosted on a web server. I wouldn't really call it native though.
dom96 1 days ago [-]
I've used GTK in the past and I wouldn't consider it robust nor easy to use. But most importantly, it doesn't look good, especially on macOS. No matter how hard you try, you cannot make it feel native.
But the point is: LLMs should make it easy to generate a native UI for each of the main platform's UI frameworks. GTK should no longer be needed.
dlcarrier 21 hours ago [-]
GTK is probably the worst of the bunch, and Tk is the most underrated. Everything looks bad on macOS, because Cocoa's API isn't as stable or well documented as Microsoft's DirectWrite and GDI variations nor obviously X or Wayland, which are open source.
Either way, getting something to appear the way you want it to in GTK is worlds easier than doing so in CSS, and it runs much faster, with a fraction of the resources.
WhiteDawn 1 days ago [-]
It will be a push and pull and I'm curious where we'll be in a couple of years.
I can fly at 100mph if I let AI run loose and with a bit of steering I can get it to output what I'm looking for and generally pass verification and tests.
If I care about the code though, and I want to keep it maintainable, the amount of time and tokens I need to spend correcting and iterating on the output quickly eats through much of the initial time I saved, to the point where I'm unsure if I'm actually saving much time at the end of the process.
With hobby projects I lean on quality more, and the async nature of AI also makes this much easier to make progress without needing my full attention to do so.
In the corporate world, there's both the pressure to accelerate with AI, but also maintain code and product quality. The dials of one way or the other are more obvious now, but I don't believe it's possible to do both with the current models and harnesses without exponential cost.
What is interesting though, is I'm now leaning towards faster models rather than smarter ones.
Intelligence lets me bite off larger chunks of work at once, and trust the model to behave without having to watch it intensely, but doesn't seem to drive down the number of iterations required to hit my desired quality.
Faster models means the iterations I'll have to go through regardless will complete much faster and gets me closer to a proper flow state. Models will keep improving, but maybe we're getting near "smart enough" and the race will pivot to performance > intelligence.
user43928 1 days ago [-]
I also spend a lot of time at work trying to get the code into a shape I deem acceptable to open a MR for the team, without looking incompetent.
At home I stopped reviewing the code for my mobile app, and I do not feel this has affected maintainability.
With 150k LOC, the AI still performs changes as easily as it did three months ago, when I started the project.
If anything, the new models made it easier.
When I read all those posts from people advocating a very hands-on, understand each line approach, I speculate many come from a position like me at work or have never seriously tried 'vibecoding' a large project from scratch with SOTA models.
People routinely post that things I work on for 30 hours/week are impossible.
callc 22 hours ago [-]
150k sounds like a LOT… what’s your use case for the app?
It seems for any particular problem/comexity there is an estimate of how many LoC is needed (written by humans, good coding practices). And after reaching maturity (and not increasing scope) the LoC converges.
My experience with LLMs so far is it’s a constant battle to not explode the LoC. There’s always pressure away from “maintainability” and a “small elegant cohesive” codebase.
user43928 15 hours ago [-]
It is in media management. I cannot talk about the features in detail, but I would not be surprised if it can be done with half the line count.
What I was trying to say is that maintainability appears largely unaffected.
Doing manual QA testing and iterating on improvements still works great.
The question then is in which cases "small elegant cohesive" is worth it, when the implementation effort increases tenfold. For the product I am working on at home for 30h/week, I can confidently say it is not worth it.
bigstrat2003 1 days ago [-]
> We built Electron because writing UIs using native desktop frameworks is tough.
No, we built Electron because there are a huge number of people who are too lazy to learn anything outside of HTML/etc for creating a UI. It's not actually hard to make a UI using the native desktop frameworks.
dom96 1 days ago [-]
I don't think that's the reason. The fact is that HTML/CSS gives far more flexibility for design than any native framework has ever done. Also, nope, it's not easy to make a UI using native desktop frameworks, especially if you need to target all 3 platforms.
tripleee 1 days ago [-]
It's not hard.. unless you're also expected to know, and be learning 100,000 other things at the same time.
sharts 1 days ago [-]
You would think so. But it seems all that everyone is obsessed with is increasing the velocity of enshitification in the hopes of becoming the next papa Elon
krapp 1 days ago [-]
>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.
We built Electron because web devs were a dime a dozen. It was an economic decision, not a technical one.
Night_Thastus 1 days ago [-]
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.
dgellow 1 days ago [-]
Don’t forget the moment where you realize that instead of cooking a steak the agent went for its own invented requirements and spent all your quota preparing everything to make the perfect ramen from scratch (or at least that’s what it tells you, when you ask it to double check what has been done it comes back and tell you it lied and in fact mixed the flour with the soup without making the noodles, with a small note telling you to not forget to prepare the noodles when you go to production)
christophilus 1 days ago [-]
I found this to be my favorite approach[0]. Also, Lan Lam’s stuff is just generally excellent.
Interesting, the NYT had a tip on flipping every 90s, but it was with a cast-iron pan and not a "cold sear". That was too smokey for our weak kitchen exhaust, so it was the last time I tried flipping multiple times.
But Lam Lam's cold sear video doesn't seem to make that much smoke on a non-stick, so I'll give this a shot again.
(Personally the reverse sear has been my idiotproof go-to.)
Thanks!
ern 1 days ago [-]
I actually find that the less I fuss over a steak, the more optimal the result. I do use a thermometer, but apart from that, cooking it with salt and pepper or some steak spice on a cheap pan (stainless steel) and cutting it when it hits temp (resting seems to be BS) gets me tasty results and immense pleasure.
Similarly, the less I fuss over modern AI tools, the better the results. My personal productivity is through the roof, but I find that outdated processes, mythology and trying to overcontrol sap the benefits of AI on larger pieces of effort involving others.
hombre_fatal 1 days ago [-]
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.
sailfast 1 days ago [-]
A software engineer user with taste, yes.
Have you ever been really deep in a thread with an agent on a technical deep dive? The trade-offs conversations would not make sense to someone that is not able to decode the real decisions they’re making.
You can dumb down the agent, but the reason domain language matters is because of the precision of the word sometimes - not to be a gatekeeper.
Anyway - user with taste that understands all the elements of their decisions would be my modifier :)
hombre_fatal 1 days ago [-]
Long ago I added an instruction to my global AGENTS.md that every time the agent asks me something, make it multiple choice that ranks the top options, give a quick trade-off summary of each one, recommend one, and justify it.
Over the last year, I've noticed that the recommended option for technical questions has become one that is always sufficient to the point that I'm once again in a tastemaker position, not in the "here's a better idea btw" position.
And if that's true, then my participation in the intermediate steps isn't strictly necessary to get a well reasoned position that's only directionally wrong.
user43928 1 days ago [-]
The Claude Code App automatically does this by default.
The Codex app only does it in Plan mode, I believe. I did not touch the Plan mode for a while.
StilesCrisis 19 hours ago [-]
Claude does, but I've also seen it give a list and then afterwards, it changes its mind and recommends option B or C instead. Really drives home how LLMs don't actually know what they're going to say until they say it.
dasil003 1 days ago [-]
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.
YuechenLi 16 hours ago [-]
>But a genuinely good steak, medium-rare from edge to edge, browned properly, seasoned right, consistently delicious, is a different matter entirely.
Actually it's pretty easy to get a consistently good steak with reverse searing, pretty much the only thing you should make sure is the surface is bone dry before you sear it to get the nice brown crust. Seasoned right? It's honestly pretty difficult to oversalt steak. If even reverse searing is too much work, I found that an air fryer works pretty well in a pitch for steaks.
sega_sai 1 days ago [-]
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)
jamesjolliffe 1 days ago [-]
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.
_diyar 1 days ago [-]
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.
theturtletalks 1 days ago [-]
I hear this take often and here are my thoughts.
AI has basically given everyone a home kitchen, but yes most people are still bad cooks because it's not their passion and it's hard to master. So they go to a restaurant with an excellent chef and eat the steak there. But the restaurant also slowly gets more expensive and quality goes down as the restaurant tries to chase more profits. Fair, but the steak you bought months ago is not the steak you will always get. If you learn to make it, you will get better and not have the overhead of running a business.
His other point was that restaurants will also replace their chefs LLMs and it will taste just like our home cooking. If that happens, other restaurants will come in and compete on better taste.
freediddy 1 days ago [-]
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.
mlhpdx 1 days ago [-]
There is a lot of truth here, but it clearly isn't a welcome one.
From my own perspective I can look back on decades of software I've written (some including code generation far before LLMs), and marvel at the quality and creativity, and lack thereof, from one piece to another.
I never meant to create awful software, but I did (and still sometimes do). With LMM code generation (vs bespoke tooling, T4, XSLT, and the like) the game of chance is part of the fun, harnessing a powerful tool that wants to run out of control on a whim.
Looking back on a couple years of LLM assisted work I see the same mix as the decades before: some great (when I managed to keep the beast restrained) some awful (when I didn't, knowingly or not).
I don't see how things are much different with this tool than others as far as my work product goes. There is a bit more of it, but the excess isn't great stuff (that quantity remains roughly consistent over the years).
wuliwong 1 days ago [-]
I was going to say something similar. In particular, I do a lot of prototyping, AI has allowed me to make prototypes an order of magnitude faster with substantially higher quality. Different types of software engineering have very different goals and standards. AI does cook the perfect medium rare steak every time, but it's able to actually cook steaks in the time it used to take me to like microwave a burrito.
HeyLaughingBoy 1 days ago [-]
> There's nothing sacred about human-written code
I suspect that there is a lifetime of knowledge and experience wrapped up in that statement and I agree wholeheartedly.
I love writing software and I've been doing it for decades. But I never forget that at the end, there's someone who's paid for it, and needs it to do a job that can't/won't be done manually. And that's why it exists. Not to satisfy my desire to express myself in code, not to allow me to create some golden tower of perfect architecture, but to do a job. Most likely a boring job in the service of increased profitability for some company.
And in the end, the only thing that matters to the customer is if it does that job well enough to be useful. I think -- hell, I know -- that many developers deliberately ignore this critical point.
zer00eyz 1 days ago [-]
> All you want is to not be hungry.
This.
Programers are high end chef's whos products are expensive.
LLM / AI tooling is going to do a much better job of delivering on the promise of AppleScript, vb script, IFTT, and every failed drag and drop coding tool that got sold to businesses over the years.
There are going to be gains in large software, from professionals - but the real gains are going to come from all the software that CAN get created that never was before.
There is an XKCD comic "Is It Worth the Time?" (link: https://xkcd.com/1205/ )- a matrix of the cost benefit of automating something. LLM's / AI tooling, generating traditional code, makes the answer "yes" in almost every case now.
idorube 1 days ago [-]
here I was just wanting just ONE post about something not AI related...
elzbardico 1 days ago [-]
Soon we will be complaining about wanting just ONE post not related to the mother of all market crashes.
marssaxman 1 days ago [-]
instead of complaining about what's here, why not go add what you feel is missing?
molybd3num 1 days ago [-]
one person can only change so much
unsatchmo 15 hours ago [-]
Why is everyone being so damned precious about software? Software is not fine wine or a nice cigar.
eloisius 15 hours ago [-]
A better analogy is a quality woodworking tool. A sharp planer is mesmerizing as you work the material. A Salesforce-acquistioned enterprise tool that redirects through 15 endpoints over 3000 ms on every link click is the antithesis to that.
akmarinov 15 hours ago [-]
They’ve been told all their lives that software must be clean, SOLID, DRY and now something comes along that doesn’t care about any of that and the business people prefer it because it gets the job done really quick.
And people hate change
altcognito 1 days ago [-]
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.
lizardking 1 days ago [-]
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.
aorloff 1 days ago [-]
I was going to say the same thing. 2.5m per side+rotation plus another 2.5 plus or minus 20s depending on heat
But I actually got something out of this -- which is that maybe before now, humans had to soak up the complexity of where value was made in software. And you saw this in the highest and best paid engineers in science and platform teams and basically that you had to invest in brains where you thought the value in your product was.
Without humans managing complexity, you have no idea where you should be investing once the product grows out of the concept stage
nunez 1 days ago [-]
Slight disagree, as many will heat their pan too high and burn the steak before it cooks through. Or maybe that was just me when I first learned how to cook steak the right way. ("Medium"/"medium-high" doesn't necessarily correlate to the position of the knob on the burner or whether the pan feels medium/medium-high)
lizardking 1 days ago [-]
True, what constitutes "Medium" on your individual stove is maybe the one single complicating factor! Otherwise it's:
- Cut steak in preheated oven at 250 degrees.
- Pull at 125-130 degrees internal temp
- Cook one minute per side in a skillet on medium heat
galgantar 1 days ago [-]
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.
10 hours ago [-]
fhub 23 hours ago [-]
I couldn't resist looking up if there was an AI grill that would cook the perfect steak.
We would cook a roast yearly and I’d insert my thermometer and collect data points and then use R to produce. Regression curve and extrapolate a time dinner would be ready. It was fun as heck and the meal always came out right.
continuational 1 days ago [-]
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.
democracy 18 hours ago [-]
Cooking a steak is easy - undercook it's "rare", burn it - it's "Well done". You cant go wrong really.
armchairhacker 1 days ago [-]
Sous vide
The article is AI generated
midnightbobarun 1 days ago [-]
It's a level of badly written that makes me think it could be a human, or it might just be an LLM that writes differently from a typical ChatGPT article.
It is slop though, either way.
sebastianconcpt 1 days ago [-]
Feels like everything is pushing us towards deciding if micromanaging the code generator or find a method where we don't even need to do that.
I still micromanage my agents, how is it with you guys?
Fordec 1 days ago [-]
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haunter 1 days ago [-]
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.
hydrogen7800 1 days ago [-]
Ramen may still be somewhat of a novelty where I live, and I would not call it cheap. Though now that I put that into words, a decent burger anywhere is about the same price..
roadside_picnic 1 days ago [-]
> and I would not call it cheap
It is compared to the cost of making an authentic ramen broth at home at the scale of feeding 2-4 people. Pho has a similar property. I've made homemade pho broth once and it was very hard work, fairly costly, and it resulted in something that was pretty good, but not comparable in quality or price to something I could have bought in a restaurant down the street. (admittedly typically also cheaper that ramen)
bigstrat2003 1 days ago [-]
Ramen restaurants are definitely not cheap in the US. I hear they are in Japan, though.
mrloopex 1 days ago [-]
Just trying to troll guys who make steak their identity. Lame.
wpwpwpw 22 hours ago [-]
One might not need skill, but might need a skillet.
z3t4 1 days ago [-]
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.
jgilias 1 days ago [-]
But not the original authors of those answers.
oblio 14 hours ago [-]
And the "person" answering:
1. Will always answer (even if sometimes wrong)
2. In a reasonable time frame
3. Can be asked in almost any language and answers in the same language
4. Is always polite
Most people were never willing to ask on StackOverlow.
Ylano 17 hours ago [-]
The useful distinction for me is between making something work and knowing why it works
andrewstetsenko 1 days ago [-]
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.
jillesvangurp 1 days ago [-]
I like a good steak but setting off the fire alarms (plural) is a big risk when I cook them in my apartment :-). Scorching hot cast iron pan plus meat means some smoke is unavoidable. And that's the proper way to do it.
The problem with many business leaders is that they don't necessarily understand the businesses they lead very well. That's common for CEOs running a tech company without a tech background. There's a long history of business leaders with MBAs throwing away the baby with the bathwater when they get a bit too enthusiastic cutting cost. It's why Boeing is such a mess. It's why Intel is no longer considered a leader in innovative chips. The likes of Nvidia and Apple are running circles around them. It's why IBM is now a consulting company that hasn't really produced any tech product worth mentioning this century. The only time they are in the news is when they do another layoff round to make share holders happy. They are incapable of innovating because the people that did that have long since left.
In the hands of somebody competent, you can do great things with AI. But if you can't tell good from bad technically, you won't know that you are creating a big stinky mess until it's far too late.
On a positive note, there will be plenty of work for competent techies to come in and straighten things out on a freelance or consultant basis (I'm available for that sort of thing but not cheap). With the help of AI of course. No need to go back to doing things manually. I think a lot of companies will realize they need help in the next years to speed things up, to improve quality, etc. They'll be very opinionated about what they want and used to getting what they want quickly.
lewo 16 hours ago [-]
> AI isn’t a chef. At best, it’s a steak machine.
Seems this analogy is also correct regarding our climate!
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.
mehal 17 hours ago [-]
Юра ну ти і завів людей! (Yura I love how you activated dialog!)
the__alchemist 1 days ago [-]
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.
brianbarnes 20 hours ago [-]
I am vegetarian, but my family likes steak so I buy it and cook it for them. I've been told it is very good. Not sure if the this is an instructive extension of the steak metaphor or not.
calmbonsai 1 days ago [-]
There’s nothing quite like a poor analogy to trigger HN.
onraglanroad 1 days ago [-]
I'm starting to really hate analogies. They more often obscure than enlighten.
encyclopedism 1 days ago [-]
It's worse, HN seems to suffer from a higher than average pedant count. The analogies are missed completely!
heddhunter 20 hours ago [-]
an analogy is like a garden shed: you try to eat it, it'll get stuck in your throat.
(with apologies to Mike from The Young Ones)
richwater 1 days ago [-]
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.
HeyLaughingBoy 1 days ago [-]
Why is that a problem?
I love a good medium-rare prime steak, but I also used to live near a restaurant called Best Steak House, which was anything but. However, they delivered a passable steak/steak sandwich that was worth what you paid for it. And considering that they were in business for decades, probably most people felt the same way.
A great steak is an occasional luxury; a "just edible" one is an everyday meal.
nehal3m 1 days ago [-]
That’s what the entire economy does by design. You make the lowest common denominator people will still pay for.
Pet_Ant 1 days ago [-]
I worry what that says about our lives as a whole. The government will make our lives the lowest common denominator that we are willing to endure.
roughly 1 days ago [-]
How are you still blaming this on “the government”? Is your thesis that the business world would be delivering high quality products and experiences if only those damned bureaucrats would get out of the way? What possible evidence do you have left for that hypothesis at this point?
EDIT: this was a misread on my part, retracted, carry on.
fhdkweig 1 days ago [-]
He isn't blaming the software problem on the government. He is saying that if we apply this reasoning to everything in our lives, then we have a race to the bottom in other facets, of which one is government.
roughly 1 days ago [-]
Yep, I see it now. Thank you.
altcognito 1 days ago [-]
He is saying "if we apply (or are applying) the same business mentality to government, we will get literally the worst government we are willing to tolerate based on money"
It's not blaming. It's an explanation for probably why things can go wrong.
roughly 1 days ago [-]
Gotcha, ok - I’m misreading it. Thank you.
LPisGood 1 days ago [-]
And people seek out the highest quality product they can pay the lease for
fhdkweig 1 days ago [-]
Not always. There are diminishing returns at the top end of the quality spectrum. I tend to go with the cheaper item even if I can technically afford the more expensive one if their quality is close enough.
sandeepkd 1 days ago [-]
The thesis is covering the flat scenarios mostly. I think the scenario where the job is done so poorly that the steak has to be thrown away needs to be included as well. At times the pans would get damaged. And eventually the business is in debt and needs to be closed
ratelimitsteve 1 days ago [-]
I can go out today and pay $50 for a thick cut ribeye at Ruth's Chris that has been visually inspected for marbling then hard seared in a special high temp over to temp by someone who knows wtf they're doing. I can also go to Denny's and pay $20 for a t-bone cooked to within shouting distance of what I asked for on the same griddle they use for the pancakes that doesn't get the sear I'm looking for.
Point being, you're absolutely right that the goal for a company selling a product is to be barely satisfactory but they don't actually get to decide what's satisfactory.
autoexec 1 days ago [-]
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.
frays 16 hours ago [-]
Great post and analogy.
green_wheel 1 days ago [-]
Damn these steak advertisements are getting sneaky
mulanroo 20 hours ago [-]
I've never cooked a steak. Not once. It feels like one of those foods where getting it wrong means you've just ruined an expensive piece of meat, so I've always let a restaurant take the risk. This post makes me think I've probably been overthinking it.
reenorap 19 hours ago [-]
Watch Alton Brown’s Good Eats on cooking steak. It takes less that 10 mins cooking time and it’s easy. That gets you 80% of the way there and then the rest is fiddling around for personal taste.
Krei-se 1 days ago [-]
ai coding is the new Symfony w/ bootstrap theme hype cycle. I'll be back to structs. Know your tools!
empressplay 1 days ago [-]
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.
threethirtytwo 1 days ago [-]
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.
badgersnake 1 days ago [-]
I’d prefer an article actually about cooking steak.
0xbadcafebee 1 days ago [-]
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.
adventured 1 days ago [-]
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.
skc 15 hours ago [-]
Chefs kiss would be this post having been written using AI.
deterministic 21 hours ago [-]
The #1 benefit of AI in my experience is improving product quality not development speed.
Claude Code is amazing at finding subtle bugs and improving the performance of the code. Something that directly benefit people using the product. Love it.
wackget 1 days ago [-]
Why does this article use backticks instead of apostrophes?
netbioserror 24 hours ago [-]
LLMs are vectoring towards solving problems of software quantity. What remains is judgment, caution, and taste for quality.
Much as computers have made creation in other industries much easier, we're likely to see a glut of crap software made by non-programmers that does not meet any quality bar because these are the sorts who think "lines of code" was the hurdle to overcome.
rhelz 1 days ago [-]
I'm tired of articles which try to make us not feel bad about being eclipsed by AI. We've got to change from the mindset of an artisan--who stakes his being on mastering skills and acquiring knowledge--to that of executives.
Figure out what you want to DO. What you really want to do, not what you do just to pay the bills. Once you figure that out, use AI as an executive uses the best employees he can buy.
atleastoptimal 1 days ago [-]
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.
balls187 20 hours ago [-]
That's right. It's not skill. It's technique.
And there are techniques that make it brain dead simple.
noisy_boy 20 hours ago [-]
If only it could do things as predictably as a steak machine. I guess flexibility comes at a price.
gyanchawdhary 1 days ago [-]
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 ..
skullone 7 hours ago [-]
Are you just ai? You make the least intelligible points ever
1 days ago [-]
chrisjj 1 days ago [-]
> 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.
feverzsj 1 days ago [-]
*salmon.
1 days ago [-]
midnightbobarun 1 days ago [-]
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.
fosterfriends 1 days ago [-]
Nicely said
jibal 1 days ago [-]
Almost no skill was required to produce that overdone analogy slop.
luisln 1 days ago [-]
slop article
micromacrofoot 24 hours ago [-]
fuck me for expecting to read something about steak I guess
modgate 14 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
tantalor 1 days ago [-]
The tone and writing style is way off here. It's practically illegible.
_dwt 1 days ago [-]
Pangram says 100% AI, for what it's worth.
tazjin 1 days ago [-]
Ironic, considering the content.
jifarooq 22 hours ago [-]
Like many other comments here, I take issue with the title. I thought I would learn how to cook a good steak. But instead it’s yet another AI article about how taste (read: judgement) matters.
vladsiu 17 hours ago [-]
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nukethebay 1 days ago [-]
Well I don’t even care right now about cooking steak. It’s too damn expensive. I suspect LLMs will eventually get there top.
digitist 1 days ago [-]
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legastenigga 1 days ago [-]
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MagicMoonlight 1 days ago [-]
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sizzzzlerz 1 days ago [-]
Who can afford a steak today without taking out a loan?
selimthegrim 1 days ago [-]
I think a certain restaurant chain might have something to say about this
HardwareLust 1 days ago [-]
Sizzler?
theendisney 1 days ago [-]
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.
slicktux 24 hours ago [-]
I’ve been taken to a steak house for birthday and was shunned for ordering something basic. My reasoning is; a steak is so easy to ruin because it’s so easy to make that it’s just not worth the price to risk eating an expensive crappy steak. So I opt for something more basic that I know will be excellent because of the establishment.
fierycatnet 1 days ago [-]
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.
nsxwolf 1 days ago [-]
I am enjoying that people would much rather just talk about actually cooking steaks than AI.
There are far, far better cooking examples out there.
I'm not sure if this analogy holds up in the AI software metaphor that the author of the blog post is making.
Edit for people who've never had good coffee:
"I don't like coffee. Can James Hoffmann change that?" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z-iNAyu-ejo
Once you get that down, zomg - a French press with even the cheapest beans you find can make an amazzzzzing cup of coffee. Beats the pants of Starbucks, and comes quite close to a proper cup of coffee made with good beans. Another trick is to rotate your cheap beans, instead of just sticking to your favorite. Dark roast of choice one week, medium the next, and so on. By the time you loop back to your favorite, it'll taste unbelievable.
That actually depends on the coffee. Pouring 99C+ water onto light roasted coffee is perfectly fine in most cases and will actually extract more.
Personally I prefer a light or medium roast over an Italian or French roast, but many people disagree
Pumpkin spice lattes.
"Boiling" differs in temperature from place to place.
Mineral content of water, altitude makes a large difference.
According to CGPT at 1km altitude the boiling temperature of water is 96.7 C.
Some very populated cities are above 2km, many are above 1km, and most great coffee is grown ~>=2km. Water hardness and flavour is a big deal as well.
It's not so much work with the right tool: I have a button on my kettle that does exactly that, and another button that will use a little thermostat to keep it warm. Works great.
https://www.sageappliances.com/en-gb/product/bke825?sku=SKE8...
Knowing really is half the battle.
It's not entirely a myth; if you've poked hundreds of steaks by the same supplier, same cuts, same grade, you'll eventually get a feel for them.
The thermometer analogy does carry over though. Some people are not there to be productive or good at their jobs. The job is about them, not their work.
And you can go your whole life without ever cooking or tasting a good steak. The people who can tell the difference will go elsewhere, and those who can't will come back.
And then there's always the boss who wishes he started a franchise but will go with what he has - he'll hire a bunch of newbies or foreign workers who know how to use a thermometer.
[1] https://amazingribs.com/ratings-reviews/best-thermometers/ho...
They have a thermometer with multiple sensors in it that finds the core temperature of the food you're cooking automatically, and predicts the rise in temperature over time. So the alarm goes off when it's time to pull and rest, which is absolutely amazing.
For maximum techyness, Combustion, Inc. correctly identified that sous vide is normally an overdamped system. If you follow their instructions you can increase the water temp some and then bring it back down in order to move the system closer to critically damped and speed up your sous vide.
You don’t have to worry about undercooking like you do with most other meats and most steak cuts will be delicious anywhere from 11-130 (if you cook a filet to 130, it won’t be the best but it’ll still be good) and some can go even higher
It’s not like poultry where the range where it’s “good” is very small. A 170 chicken breast is almost inedible and 160 is not safe…
This is why sous vide is such a popular way to cook chicken. You can hold a breast at 145 for hours trivially.
165 is a rough rule of thumb, not some magic number like the boiling point of water at 1 bar or something.
In particular, I use 135F for 90 minutes (75 minimum recommended) to pasteurize eggs that I am going to be putting into something that asks for "raw" eggs (egg nog, mayonnaise, etc.) that I will serve to other people (if it's just for myself, I'll probably just be lazy and use the raw egg). So far, nobody has noticed any difference from "raw".
I can certainly tell the difference between a good steak and a bad one.
There are some coffee beans that have crazy taste profiles when properly extracted with the right water. I had one that tastes literally like a peach and another that tasted like a really nice tea.
Or maybe not. Different strokes!
But I would say I know I'm also weird in that food temp really doesn't bother me all that much. I enjoy my coffee even as it goes from hot to cold.
A steak for me can be more easily messed up. But then I've not tried instant coffee so maybe I've just never tasted the bottom of the barrel for coffee.
Additionally, if you mess up a really good steak, that's like $30+, whereas if I mess up a pourover, that's ~$20/(340g / grams per cup); a relatively small risk surface.
Personally, I think if you actually like coffee, most of it should be drinkable, and the really great cups with rare beans that sit on the margins can be appreciated occasionally for what they are when fortune prevails. The bottom of the barrel for me is basically anything "second wave" or straight out of a gas station. Even instant coffee and McDonalds isn't as bad a place that has "Java" in the name or claims to have "gourmet" coffee. Older Italian places often fall into this, because (some) tend use the absolute cheapest Robusta beans with the harshest darkest roast profiles. Robusta tends to be the most rubbery burnt tire tasting crap out there.
Unsurprisingly my interests are very color-dominant (design, art, fashion) and I do not care for anything where smell matters (wine, coffee, flowers).
Really, I get it, even bad pizza is still pizza.
Or pick dancing: when you start out, you’re entirely occupied with placing your feet in the right spots at the right time. As you practice, your mind gets freed up and you’re able to make deliberate alterations, embellishments, larger figures. That seems impossible at the start.
I've tried good coffee. At least that's what people told ne on multiple accasions where I was taken to "the right places" in multiple countries. On two sides of the globe (Brazil and Vietnam if we are talking about producers, not to mention countries that import the beans).
Thing is: no matter where it grows, no matter how they prepare it, fermented or not, different frying, different brewing techniques - all the same to me.
I can tell the difference. Some times small, some times very huge. But still for this difference is like a cat piss from some street cat and a cat with a pedigree.
It may have the ideal temperature, ideal acid levels, zinc amounts or whatever - still tastes like cat piss. The fact that it has a pedigree does not make it better.
Tea is whole different story for me though. But I do accepts that people are fine with whatever they love in their "english breakfast tea" or a nameless teabag.
Dialling in espresso isn’t simply a matter of finding the right grind setting on the grinder and locking it in. One coffee may pour a perfect 9 bar espresso and then a different coffee might gush like a shower head and spray sour, weak coffee all over the place, while a third coffee could jam up like squeezing water out of a stone, with barely a drop of extremely bitter liquid falling in the cup, all on the same grind setting!
In other words, every batch of coffee beans needs to be dialled in separately, and there can also be a lot more adjustments needed than simply the grind (water temperature and brew ratio are big factors as well). An expert will know how to adjust at least those 3 variables (grind, temperature, ratio) all in concert to get the most out of a particular coffee. On top of all that, the true master can make use of grinder type (burr design) pressure, flow, and even temperature profiling to fully customize a shot, but that’s going far into the weeds.
I, on the other hand, have a pretty good nose and I can pick out peach, raspberry, toasted nuts, caramel, marshmallow, chocolate, and blueberry notes from a variety of different coffees I’ve bought. The smell of some of these coffees is mesmerizing, like walking into a high end patisserie.
Without that smell component, the coffees taste either sour or bitter or somewhere in between.
I found a 5+ year old half-full bag in the back of the pantry once; that was quite noticeably bad even though I usually can't tell the difference between kinds beyond recognizing that there is some sort of difference.
I don't like coffee. Can James Hoffmann change that? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z-iNAyu-ejo
It has been argued, even in the before-AI-times, that most professional software is just gluing together open source tools and libraries. Your job isn't to write software, it's to set up redis and postgres and a programming language and a react frontend or whatever in a way that lets them do what they're there to do. Most modern programming is just configuration of pre-existing tools. It doesn't really matter how good your code is as long as it isn't terrible, Real Programmers already did 95% of the necessary work before you decided to build your little app.
To get good steak you don't need USDA Prime dry-aged steak. You just need USDA choice, picked for a bit of marbling, salted the day beforehand and dried out uncovered in the fridge, then a ripping hot heat source (grill or cast iron etc) to get a good sear on the outside (reverse or not) and a thermometer to hit medium rare on the inside.
Even a modest steak made this way tastes better than a prime steakhouse steak that was doused with salt right before cooking, where you're going to get hypertension immediately yet the meat tastes weirdly unflavorful.
To extend this analogy further, consider making BBQ brisket Texas style. Brisket is a cheap cut of tough, fatty meat. The input quality matters even less there, and it's all dependent on chef skill. Same thing with sourdough bread — 4 ingredients, all outcome depends on skill.
Source: we make an app that teaches people how to cook (https://parsnip.ai)
You're arguing against a strawman on your other points since I didn't make a generalization about all cooking and wouldn't have listed sourdough or brisket in the analogy.
But even a cheap steak can be decent if it's cooked properly. And an expensive prime cut can be ruined by cooking it improperly.
A very tough gristly cut can be improved by tenderizing. Going low-and-slow/sous vide to melt the connective tissue. Even grinding it up to make a hamburger steak / loco moco.
Once you know all of those things, choosing the right approach and executing it is not that hard. The steps themselves are simple.
It's this story all over again:
https://engineerine.com/10000-dollar-chalk-mark/
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/know-where-man/
Sir, I regret to inform you that you are going straight to hell.
This is likely some food thing I don't know about rather than a quite large piece of paper yeah?
But when I google "A1 food":
- AI summary: "A1 is a famous Malaysian food brand known for herbal soups and instant noodles"
- top link is "A1 Nutrition Lean Protein Blend Dry Dog Food 15kg"
At this point, I don't know what is going on.
That's almost as long as Australia has been colonised and certainly older than Australian federation and yet, A1 steak sauce is not a big thing in our supermarkets apparently.
CBF with having to travel a bull up here when a dewar goes in the boot of my car.
"Your job is to not mess up."
Also applicable to any corporate job.
However, your example actually proves the point.
How many people who want a good steak know how to identify a high quality cut? Do they even know where to buy a high quality cut? What the different cuts are and whether they want rump, sirloin or fillet? How many kitchens have a meat thermometer? How many home cooks know how to use it and what the right temperature should be? How many home cooks know about reverse searing? Or timing? Or resting? Or seasoning?
Is it all learnable? Sure. But even something as simple as steak has nuance that needs to be learned, equipment deployed to go from "pretty good" to "great", experimentation and trial and error.
Steak is the simplest thing to choose to get started. It's also the hardest to get right.
Building an app is the simplest thing to choose to get started. It's also the hardest to get right.
So, honestly, the whole metaphor stands up pretty well for me, specifically because of your response.
In my opinion, steak has gotten the reputation that it has because it's so easy to get top tier restaurant quality at home (relative to cooking more generally). It is easy enough that, with a little care, almost any one can master it if they decide to, and therefore lots of people try and end up caring, and discussing, and sharing tips, etc.
There are a whole host of dishes where true mastery, to restaurant level, is borderline impossible for a home chef, and so most people never even try.
I don't disagree that reliably getting the last 5% of quality out of a steak is non-trivial, but the idea that, relative to the entire world of cooking, it's particularly difficult is laughably incorrect.
That simple process, suggested by Nathan Myhrvold (former MSFT cto) in the modernist cuisine, produces a filet better than most restaurants.
I used to sous-vide a lot. It was certainly great to get perfectly-done steak. but I still didn't love the result and it took me a while to figure out.
Specifically: sous-viding at 130 doesn't reliably render fat. So it's great for a lean filet mignon like your suggesting, but kept giving me rubbery fat in anything with more fat or significant marbling. I eventually switched away from sous-vide (I usually either grill or reverse sear, depending on my effort/time availability) for most cuts these days.
Honestly this is like the Dropbox comment all over again. Everyone is missing the point, it's glorious. :)
Most people cooking steaks don't care about the optimal way to cook steaks, or want to find out.
Most people building software today don't care about the optimal way to build software, or want to find out.
That's TFA. That's the point. That's what we're discussing. :D
Only prerequisites are a cheap kitchen thermometer, a ziploc gallon bag, and a cheap cooler. Everything is available at your typical supermarket or even goodwill. This is a very hands off cooking method and requires no experimentation, just follow the recipe and you get a perfect steak every time.
The key is that a cooler holds hot things just as well as cold things but without a circulator and heater to keep the water warm, you're at the mercy of the cooler's R-value. The water will eventually get too cold to effectively cook the meat so you're limited in the length of time you can sous vide. Doing a 24 hour chuck roast is simply not going to work unless you're refilling the cooler every couple hours.
It's the deep frying for the sear.
Not many people are willing to deep fry in their kitchens. It's messy, potentially dangerous, and not only stinks up the entire house for days but leaves a layer of oil over everything in the home that builds up and you can never really fully remove.
There's a reason restaurants have massive powerful vents above the deep fryer, and that people who regularly deep-fry at home do it outdoors.
This "simple process" is much, much simpler than most meals one cooks at home. It's not much harder than microwaving something.
You are missing the point. With a small change in the way you do something, the really good thing can be made.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XrZPLF0ezw8nn
Meat where the salt is just on the surface, vs. meat where the salt has fully penetrated, is like night and day.
Bad restaurants, sure. It does not hold a candle to any half decent steakhouse.
Exactly. Outback and Chilis has awful steak, but that explains the steak cooking advice here. Mortons is probably the best chain restaurant steak in the US. Texas Roadhouse for a cheaper almost-as-good version, but still far and away better than Outback
What in the world are you guys in this thread doing to steak? Absolute blasphemy. Costco steak? ziplock bags? drowning it in warm water? deep frying in corn oil? meat thermometers?
Steak is not this complicated. The important part is the meat itself. Find a decent butcher (preferably one that dry-ages) or use a grocery store's butcher cuts over stuff they bulk package. Also, ribeyes (bone-in but if not still ribeye), other cuts are for steak and egg omelets.
Lightly salt (or season, oil, dry-rub, etc); Pan sear, preferably blue steel cookware; then broil.
Don't stab the meat with a meat poker...after cooking enough steaks the same way one can simply tell what temperature is. Ask me to cook anything else outside steak and eggs and I will absolutely butcher it, but steak deserves better than ziplock bags and deep frying
The map is never the terrain.
All software to an extent is a model map of some real world phenomena. The limitations of which can actually be advantageous, a good example is why games with poor graphics can be so immersive.
Sure there are a few things that knowledge and skill can do to make a steak better or worse. But the entire range from worst to best is just tiny. The best steak in the world is not a steak moon shot, it's just barely any different from what anyone can do after barely any instruction.
It's a tiny thing to become about as good as it's possible to get.
It might take more than 10 years, but robots will almost certainly master cooking single pieces of meat.
It's substantially harder to reach self driving than it is to cook a "good" steak.
Sure, for probably quite a long time you'll be able to find someone who can cook a way better steak than the best robot, especially because taste is extremely subjective...
You can debate the horizon and the extent, but changes ARE coming.
Change is the only thing you can count on besides death.
I need to go to the market, find the steak I want, and purchase it, get it home, and put it in the fridge.
Then when I want to cook it I need to find it in the fridge, unwrap it, season it, and let it come up to room temp.
That's all before you get to the actual cooking.
The self driving car already does everything.
Well, we don't know that, because neither have been achieved.
Sure, we will completely ignore Waymo and move goal posts...
Waymo has completed 20 MILLION autonomous rides, 6.5m last quarter alone...
At what point does it get to say it can self-drive? When there's not a single non-self-driven car left on the road?
My criteria: When you can drop this car at a random spot on earth (where cars can actually go of course) and tell it to go to place B. So this can be anywhere from a big city to a small dirt road in the forest.
I'm still working on collecting the drive to all states badge. I've only accomplished half. I calculated my total driving since getting a license recently and its approx. ~360k miles or around 17k miles a year.
If Waymo can eventually handle rural life in the US I'd be seriously impressed.
Even if Waymo's healthy growth rate continues, it won't make up 5% of the entire US rideshare market until 2030.
That's still several years away from ever even thinking about rural areas.
I think what my home steaks are really missing is the crust from salamander broiler. I don't have anything at home that can exceed 1000 F / 550 C.
If you get those parts right (and control the inside temp via sous vide or reverse sear) most of the other stuff is pretty marginal in how much it helps. Even all of the extra herbs, and butter basting and everything -- relatively insignificant compared to just getting the salt-level right.
I've thought about trying that, but I'd need to first strip the seasoning off the pan to avoid all kinds of nasty flavors. The second pan makes sense...
Cheap knock off a Big Green Egg with hardwood charcoal can get to 650°F or so pretty quick, and does an amazing job of finishing up after a reverse sear.
Further, they don't just accept what each of those H.I.s does on their first try. The most visible example is when the H.I. actors don't act exactly as the director wants, they retake the scene. But, the same is true of all the rest. As the "director" they "direct" each of those H.I.s toward their vision.
IT seems similar for coding with an LLM. I become the director. I direct the LLM. I check it's results and if they are unacceptable I re-take with instruction on how to do things closer to what I actually want.
A director can assume the camera person will push back if a shot is unusable. An LLM will cheerfully hand you something that compiles, looks polished in the demo path, and quietly fails on the cases you didn't spell out. Retakes help, but only if you already know which frames are wrong.
That's the part of the steak essay that lands for me: the machine will follow a recipe at scale. Judging "this is charcoal dressed as medium-rare" is still on you.
I'm looking at you, Guillermo del Toro.
No need to bring it up to room temp. No need to let it rest after. No need to do anything except those two steps. It’s recommended for 2” thick steaks, and you can go under by half an inch easily, but this can be a little rough on very thin steaks.
Perfect grilled steak, especially well-done, is something I find very few people have the experience or skills to do well, especially over a coal grill where the heat won't be constant and the person also need to first have good experience in making a good and even coal bed.
isn't it just a word for "making food", so would include grilling as well?
Imagine someone walking into their local grocer, grabbing a prepackaged porterhouse steak (because it's fancy right?), salt and pepper (because for a good steak that's all you need, right) and then wondering why part of it tastes bland and overdone, and the other part bland and under-done.
Sounds pretty analogous imo.
Most people or even restaurant don't let their meat outside nor use an actual hot pan.
Until I moved to Taiwan. I truly can’t understand how no one can make a steak. From the garbage pale meat glue “night market steaks” to expensive restaurants. Every steak I’ve had here is a complete disappointment. Even when they supposedly use top-quality US prime or Japanese Wagyu, even when the inside looks pink and not burned to a crisp, it’s always total dogfood quality. They often emulate the right look: pink interior, char on the outside, shiny tallow. But something is off. I never feel like I’m chewing a piece of steak. More like grinding tasteless muscle protein into paste with my teeth.
I don’t even know how it’s wrong sometimes. I look at it and just know that something is wrong that I wouldn’t even know how to replicate, becayse cooking a decent steak is easy to me.
How can I make a really great steak myself? What to look out for, what to do. Give me detailed instructions.
I got a really good answer (including - cut, temperature and reverse searing), so I probably won't even need understanding. (Oh - and yes, I can cook - the answer mirrors what I already know).
Yes, it was a very, very poor analogy, because cooking a steak is a well known and well documented thing where LLMS produce good output. They fail when you get off the beaten path and try to do something that's not "mainstream".
AI gave me the cut, the temp, the timing, the things to watch out for.
Chicken's the best to try first, can't mess that up.
After goodness knows how many hours..
Pretty inedible leathery chicken..
"Oh my bad! I gave you the timings for a different meat"
In general I'd recommend starting with the most forgiving meat available to you (IMO pork butt or shoulder are great options) as even when you don't hit the ideal cook you often still get enjoyable results. Repeating the process enough times to learn how to dial in a cook is much easier when the misses don't suck.
A meat probe and the 30-second flip technique is a stupid-easy way to a perfect steak every time. Just make sure you've got great ventilation. Also salt the meat 1 hour before.
Some people just want to _cook the steak_.
They don't want to attend or understand to cuts, thermometers, and searing.
He may have missed the point.
AI-generated code does not seem to have parsimony, for one. Generating code is cheap, so there's no drive to condense it. LLMs are not yet good at formulating abstractions to make code smaller, leading to code bloat. It's the same phenomenon that appears when humans modify code they only partially understand by adding special cases to general code.
There are complaints about "elegance", but it's more useful to talk about parsimony. Code bloat is measurable. Elegance is hard to assess.
is it rare, medium-rare, medium, well-done?
i think it is subjective.
interesting, because if you want a steak medium rare in France you order it "au point", "at the point"
>Cooking even an excellent steak is actually not that hard. In fact, I'd argue that it's among the easiest things to master... and knowing about reverse searing is about all it takes
but discovery (or rediscovery?) of reverse searing was just a few short years ago.
"not spreading infection between patients is easy, just wash your hands" was a huge discovery, not an "oh, everybody knows that"
It’s not surprising people on HN find it easy because attention to detail is rewarded in this community/its employers. But common here and common are different beasts.
I'll leave it to you to figure out how to unfuck AI, but I reckon 600 watts won't provide enough inference capacity.
The first, and by far most important is that unlike ground meat, your bacterial concerns are almost entirely on the surface. Unless something very very very wrong has occurred in the processing and transport chain, bacteria will not have penetrated into the meat. And if it's gotten bad enough that they have, you will almost certainly be able to see and smell it. And the surface is cooked to a temperature far in excess of that needed to kill bacteria.
And even for the interior, rare is not the same as raw. A completely rare steak should be cooked to between 120 and 130 (if you want it "blue" you might go down to 120). That's enough to get a decent reduction in bacterial count on it's own, although admittedly many techniques will not hold it long enough to get the number of log reductions that food safety guidelines recommend, in the case that you somehow did have a large bacterial infection in the interior.
So the answer to your question is that if you are buying your meat from an even halfway reputable source, the only place that bacteria might exist is on the surface, where it has been cut by tools and handled by the butcher/you and in general come into contact with the world. Those bacteria will be 100% killed by the cooking process. The odds of getting sick from a rare steak are low enough that if you are concerned about that, there are innumerable other things in your life that you should be more concerned by.
This way undersells what's actually happening: fecal matter from the intestines gets onto your meat. This shouldn't happen with proper practices.
Proper butchering SHOULDN'T spread the contents of the digestive tract on the large muscles.
In the case of steaks, bacteria is only on the outside (they can't penetrate the muscle) so the sear makes it safe to eat somewhat raw on the inside.
A great steak deserves the respect of preparing it the best, most consistent way you can. For me, that's a reverse sear.
Do something complicated with potatoes to stretch your skills and show off. Worst comes to worst the potatoes are sad.
It might be more impressive, but I don't see how reverse sear is cheating.
My bad hot take is if you're using a meat thermometer and reverse sear to cook steak, you're like a kid on training wheels.
The gestapo isn't going to kick in the door and haul folks away for using reverse-sear and a meat thermometer while they cook a steak in their own kitchen.
(And everyone is free to seek their own kind of masochistic pride, if that behooves them. When a person has better satisfaction [or whatever they get out of it] from doing things the hard way, then that's OK too.)
Anyhoo.
https://ahdictionary.com/word/search.html?q=chastise
k.
I'm entitled to my opinion, which I self-described as a bad hot take.
Sounds like you're the one specifically reprimanding me here? Oops...
Maybe we can chat again after recess is over?
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.
I have reread the post and see no such claim. They are using “we” to refer to the significant subset of humanity which fits the description, not “all software engineers”.
If someone says “we are addicted to fast food” (or social media, or what have you), we can understand they don’t mean literally everyone. Some people never even eat it, so they couldn’t be addicted, but there’s enough people who do to make the claim. It’s a generalisation.
Suggested response: “I do, but the poor thing is not strong enough. No no, I meant one of us needs to do it. Please do go ahead, if you don’t mind, as I’m a bit busy feeding the mouse.”
I've seen this so many times where the same individual introduced and fixed the bug, it is now funny.
This is corporate team level equivalent of "Socializing losses and privatizing profits".
> You need to know what you’re actually asking for, how to judge what comes back, and when the machine is just confidently serving you charcoal.
It's surprising to me this even needs to be written down. Like, obviously still use your brain and think about what the computer is doing. Did you guys think that LLMs were magic?
Saying this to set expectations based on having a business license since 1984.
It’s great to yearn for bug free software, but that necessarily brings an insane amount of red tape to get anything done. Like 5 years worth of review to start building your code with the next version of your compiler. Or six months to ship a hundred lines of code.
I'd rather have bugs. I’d happily quit having anything to do with software than suffer months of doing nothing in the name of security.
You did the same thing you criticize the author for doing.
Show HN: I Derived a Steak https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48691840
1. Turn grill on all the way. Close lid. Wait for grill's gauge to reach >400 F (>200C).
2. Put steak on grill. Close lid. Wait 2 minutes.
3. Rotate steak 90 degrees, placing on a fresh section of the grill (not where it just was). Close lid. Wait 2 minutes.
4. Flip steak over, placing on a fresh section of the grill (not where it just was). Close lid. Wait 2 minutes.
5. Rotate steak 90 degrees, placing on a fresh section of the grill (not where it just was). Close lid. Wait 2 minutes.
It's been 8 minutes of grilling. Steak is about done. Stab it with a meat thermometer into the middle part, it should read 350 F (or 176 C) to be medium done (pink in middle).
Tips:
a) Optional but recommended: rub steak with olive oil and steak seasoning on both sides, including the edge.
b) If steak is thicker: add a little more time. If thinner, use less time.
c) If steak is frozen (buy good cheap steaks and freeze to last a long time): add a little time.
d) To cheat, put a little dab of butter on top for the last segment of each side.
e) Leave the steak out for 15-20 minutes to get to room temp before making it.
f) Let it sit on a plate for 8 minutes before serving. It's still cooking, and the juices settle in. You can "tent" foil over it if you want.
g) Don't cut the steak when checking it. "Fast" and accurate meat thermometers are cheap now.
This is for grilling. The stove, broiler, and cast iron skillet instructions are different.
Maybe you forgot to include the glue on your pizza as well.
>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...
(Meanwhile my main takeaway from this is that, like AI, people really like talking about making steak and make it their whole personality)
Those existing make the comparison a bit silly. Though, given how those seem to be somewhat of a niche that few people know or care about maybe automated perfection isn't what all people have an interest in. Process vs. result and all that. Or maybe it's just that few people realize that optigrills are a thing that exist and how good they are.
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.
That said, TFA is slop whether produced by AI or not.
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.
Because CSS is constantly changing, inconsistently implemented, and difficult to use, it can't easily be targeted by widget engines (although Qt has tried, and maybe others) and web browsers already exist, so webview environments like Electron are the quickest way to get a cross-platform installable application that can also be hosted on a web server. I wouldn't really call it native though.
But the point is: LLMs should make it easy to generate a native UI for each of the main platform's UI frameworks. GTK should no longer be needed.
Either way, getting something to appear the way you want it to in GTK is worlds easier than doing so in CSS, and it runs much faster, with a fraction of the resources.
I can fly at 100mph if I let AI run loose and with a bit of steering I can get it to output what I'm looking for and generally pass verification and tests.
If I care about the code though, and I want to keep it maintainable, the amount of time and tokens I need to spend correcting and iterating on the output quickly eats through much of the initial time I saved, to the point where I'm unsure if I'm actually saving much time at the end of the process.
With hobby projects I lean on quality more, and the async nature of AI also makes this much easier to make progress without needing my full attention to do so.
In the corporate world, there's both the pressure to accelerate with AI, but also maintain code and product quality. The dials of one way or the other are more obvious now, but I don't believe it's possible to do both with the current models and harnesses without exponential cost.
What is interesting though, is I'm now leaning towards faster models rather than smarter ones.
Intelligence lets me bite off larger chunks of work at once, and trust the model to behave without having to watch it intensely, but doesn't seem to drive down the number of iterations required to hit my desired quality.
Faster models means the iterations I'll have to go through regardless will complete much faster and gets me closer to a proper flow state. Models will keep improving, but maybe we're getting near "smart enough" and the race will pivot to performance > intelligence.
At home I stopped reviewing the code for my mobile app, and I do not feel this has affected maintainability.
With 150k LOC, the AI still performs changes as easily as it did three months ago, when I started the project.
If anything, the new models made it easier.
When I read all those posts from people advocating a very hands-on, understand each line approach, I speculate many come from a position like me at work or have never seriously tried 'vibecoding' a large project from scratch with SOTA models.
People routinely post that things I work on for 30 hours/week are impossible.
It seems for any particular problem/comexity there is an estimate of how many LoC is needed (written by humans, good coding practices). And after reaching maturity (and not increasing scope) the LoC converges.
My experience with LLMs so far is it’s a constant battle to not explode the LoC. There’s always pressure away from “maintainability” and a “small elegant cohesive” codebase.
What I was trying to say is that maintainability appears largely unaffected.
Doing manual QA testing and iterating on improvements still works great.
The question then is in which cases "small elegant cohesive" is worth it, when the implementation effort increases tenfold. For the product I am working on at home for 30h/week, I can confidently say it is not worth it.
No, we built Electron because there are a huge number of people who are too lazy to learn anything outside of HTML/etc for creating a UI. It's not actually hard to make a UI using the native desktop frameworks.
We built Electron because web devs were a dime a dozen. It was an economic decision, not a technical one.
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.
And yes, super easy to make with almost no skill.
[0] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=uJcO1W_TD74&pp=ygURVGVjaG5pcXV...
But Lam Lam's cold sear video doesn't seem to make that much smoke on a non-stick, so I'll give this a shot again.
(Personally the reverse sear has been my idiotproof go-to.)
Thanks!
Similarly, the less I fuss over modern AI tools, the better the results. My personal productivity is through the roof, but I find that outdated processes, mythology and trying to overcontrol sap the benefits of AI on larger pieces of effort involving others.
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.
Have you ever been really deep in a thread with an agent on a technical deep dive? The trade-offs conversations would not make sense to someone that is not able to decode the real decisions they’re making.
You can dumb down the agent, but the reason domain language matters is because of the precision of the word sometimes - not to be a gatekeeper.
Anyway - user with taste that understands all the elements of their decisions would be my modifier :)
Over the last year, I've noticed that the recommended option for technical questions has become one that is always sufficient to the point that I'm once again in a tastemaker position, not in the "here's a better idea btw" position.
And if that's true, then my participation in the intermediate steps isn't strictly necessary to get a well reasoned position that's only directionally wrong.
The Codex app only does it in Plan mode, I believe. I did not touch the Plan mode for a while.
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.
Actually it's pretty easy to get a consistently good steak with reverse searing, pretty much the only thing you should make sure is the surface is bone dry before you sear it to get the nice brown crust. Seasoned right? It's honestly pretty difficult to oversalt steak. If even reverse searing is too much work, I found that an air fryer works pretty well in a pitch for steaks.
God I, totally unironically, love HN.
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.
AI has basically given everyone a home kitchen, but yes most people are still bad cooks because it's not their passion and it's hard to master. So they go to a restaurant with an excellent chef and eat the steak there. But the restaurant also slowly gets more expensive and quality goes down as the restaurant tries to chase more profits. Fair, but the steak you bought months ago is not the steak you will always get. If you learn to make it, you will get better and not have the overhead of running a business.
His other point was that restaurants will also replace their chefs LLMs and it will taste just like our home cooking. If that happens, other restaurants will come in and compete on better taste.
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.
From my own perspective I can look back on decades of software I've written (some including code generation far before LLMs), and marvel at the quality and creativity, and lack thereof, from one piece to another.
I never meant to create awful software, but I did (and still sometimes do). With LMM code generation (vs bespoke tooling, T4, XSLT, and the like) the game of chance is part of the fun, harnessing a powerful tool that wants to run out of control on a whim.
Looking back on a couple years of LLM assisted work I see the same mix as the decades before: some great (when I managed to keep the beast restrained) some awful (when I didn't, knowingly or not).
I don't see how things are much different with this tool than others as far as my work product goes. There is a bit more of it, but the excess isn't great stuff (that quantity remains roughly consistent over the years).
I suspect that there is a lifetime of knowledge and experience wrapped up in that statement and I agree wholeheartedly.
I love writing software and I've been doing it for decades. But I never forget that at the end, there's someone who's paid for it, and needs it to do a job that can't/won't be done manually. And that's why it exists. Not to satisfy my desire to express myself in code, not to allow me to create some golden tower of perfect architecture, but to do a job. Most likely a boring job in the service of increased profitability for some company.
And in the end, the only thing that matters to the customer is if it does that job well enough to be useful. I think -- hell, I know -- that many developers deliberately ignore this critical point.
This.
Programers are high end chef's whos products are expensive.
LLM / AI tooling is going to do a much better job of delivering on the promise of AppleScript, vb script, IFTT, and every failed drag and drop coding tool that got sold to businesses over the years.
There are going to be gains in large software, from professionals - but the real gains are going to come from all the software that CAN get created that never was before.
There is an XKCD comic "Is It Worth the Time?" (link: https://xkcd.com/1205/ )- a matrix of the cost benefit of automating something. LLM's / AI tooling, generating traditional code, makes the answer "yes" in almost every case now.
And people hate change
But I actually got something out of this -- which is that maybe before now, humans had to soak up the complexity of where value was made in software. And you saw this in the highest and best paid engineers in science and platform teams and basically that you had to invest in brains where you thought the value in your product was.
Without humans managing complexity, you have no idea where you should be investing once the product grows out of the concept stage
- Cut steak in preheated oven at 250 degrees. - Pull at 125-130 degrees internal temp - Cook one minute per side in a skillet on medium heat
Hiring AI cooks is not a problem imo, as long as the human glances over everything that they serve.
https://uncrate.com/seergrills-perfecta-ai-grill/
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.
The article is AI generated
It is slop though, either way.
I still micromanage my agents, how is it with you guys?
It is compared to the cost of making an authentic ramen broth at home at the scale of feeding 2-4 people. Pho has a similar property. I've made homemade pho broth once and it was very hard work, fairly costly, and it resulted in something that was pretty good, but not comparable in quality or price to something I could have bought in a restaurant down the street. (admittedly typically also cheaper that ramen)
1. Will always answer (even if sometimes wrong)
2. In a reasonable time frame
3. Can be asked in almost any language and answers in the same language
4. Is always polite
Most people were never willing to ask on StackOverlow.
Apart from that, I want to believe (and even notice tiny signals) that this sentiment is becoming more understandable among business leaders.
The problem with many business leaders is that they don't necessarily understand the businesses they lead very well. That's common for CEOs running a tech company without a tech background. There's a long history of business leaders with MBAs throwing away the baby with the bathwater when they get a bit too enthusiastic cutting cost. It's why Boeing is such a mess. It's why Intel is no longer considered a leader in innovative chips. The likes of Nvidia and Apple are running circles around them. It's why IBM is now a consulting company that hasn't really produced any tech product worth mentioning this century. The only time they are in the news is when they do another layoff round to make share holders happy. They are incapable of innovating because the people that did that have long since left.
In the hands of somebody competent, you can do great things with AI. But if you can't tell good from bad technically, you won't know that you are creating a big stinky mess until it's far too late.
On a positive note, there will be plenty of work for competent techies to come in and straighten things out on a freelance or consultant basis (I'm available for that sort of thing but not cheap). With the help of AI of course. No need to go back to doing things manually. I think a lot of companies will realize they need help in the next years to speed things up, to improve quality, etc. They'll be very opinionated about what they want and used to getting what they want quickly.
Seems this analogy is also correct regarding our climate!
https://foodfootprint.nl/en/foodprintfinder/beef-steak/
(with apologies to Mike from The Young Ones)
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.
I love a good medium-rare prime steak, but I also used to live near a restaurant called Best Steak House, which was anything but. However, they delivered a passable steak/steak sandwich that was worth what you paid for it. And considering that they were in business for decades, probably most people felt the same way.
A great steak is an occasional luxury; a "just edible" one is an everyday meal.
EDIT: this was a misread on my part, retracted, carry on.
It's not blaming. It's an explanation for probably why things can go wrong.
Point being, you're absolutely right that the goal for a company selling a product is to be barely satisfactory but they don't actually get to decide what's satisfactory.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Claude Code is amazing at finding subtle bugs and improving the performance of the code. Something that directly benefit people using the product. Love it.
Much as computers have made creation in other industries much easier, we're likely to see a glut of crap software made by non-programmers that does not meet any quality bar because these are the sorts who think "lines of code" was the hurdle to overcome.
Figure out what you want to DO. What you really want to do, not what you do just to pay the bills. Once you figure that out, use AI as an executive uses the best employees he can buy.
And there are techniques that make it brain dead simple.
And that's this "AI"tool too.
Garbage in, garbage out, as we say.
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.