Developer Palate Series - Part 2 of 5 - From Recipe Follower to Menu Creator
Why AI Forces Developers to Stop Coding and Start Deciding
I've noticed something about restaurants. Line cooks execute recipes. Chefs create menus. One follows instructions. The other composes experiences.
Therefore, we've been line cooks all along.
For years, we've been line cooks. Product gives us a recipe (requirements), we execute. "Build a login page." "Add pagination." "Implement search." We've gotten really good at following recipes.
But then AI arrived. And it's the ultimate line cook. It can follow any recipe faster than we ever could. Perfect form, every time (iff you provide proper model, prompt, and context). Therefore, we face an existential choice: compete with the robot line cook, or become the chef.
The shift isn't about writing code anymore. It's about knowing which code deserves to exist. That feature request that smells like it'll complicate everything? That's your palate saying "this will ruin the meal." The elegant solution that makes three other features obsolete? That's menu composition.
AI will build whatever you ask. It doesn't question if your 21-field form makes sense. Therefore, users abandon at field 12. But the AI doesn't know this. It won't push back on the authentication flow that requires six steps. Therefore, it keeps building broken experiences. It just cooks what's ordered.
But you? You've sat through the user interviews, therefore you know everyone abandons the form at field 12. You've debugged the auth flow at 3am, therefore you know which patterns break under pressure. You know what works not because you read it in a cookbook, but because you've served these meals before.
That's the real shift. From "how to implement" to "what's worth implementing." From recipe follower to menu creator.
The robots are in the kitchen. Therefore, you must become the chef. But this means leaving code behind. Therefore:
From implementer to decider.
But what if you're not ready to be a chef? Therefore, start small. Question one requirement today. Ask "what problem does this really solve?" Because that's how chefs begin - by tasting, not by cooking.