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Posted by yusyd 5 hours ago

Almost no skill required to cook a steak(blog.sydorets.com)
191 points | 220 commentspage 2
Night_Thastus 3 hours 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 2 hours 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 5 hours ago||
I found this to be my favorite approach[0]. Also, Lan Lam’s stuff is just generally excellent.

And yes, super easy to make with almost no skill.

[0] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=uJcO1W_TD74&pp=ygURVGVjaG5pcXV...

et-al 3 hours ago|
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!

hombre_fatal 5 hours 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 4 hours 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 4 hours 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 43 minutes 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.

empressplay 57 minutes 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.

_diyar 3 hours 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.

idorube 4 hours ago||
here I was just wanting just ONE post about something not AI related...
marssaxman 4 hours ago||
instead of complaining about what's here, why not go add what you feel is missing?
molybd3num 2 hours ago||
one person can only change so much
elzbardico 4 hours ago||
Soon we will be complaining about wanting just ONE post not related to the mother of all market crashes.
galgantar 5 hours 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.

jamesjolliffe 2 hours 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.

sega_sai 5 hours 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)
lizardking 3 hours 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 2 hours 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 2 hours 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 56 minutes 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

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