Gourmet Software
Stub • 149 Words • Artificial Intelligence, Software Engineering, 2026 • 05/04/2026
⚠️ This post contains a rougher cut of my thoughts on the topic and may be updated in the future. Please forgive any mistakes or lack of polish!
A new food-based metaphor about a potentially emergent category of software.
There are 151 words in this article, and it will probably take you less than 1 minute to read it.
This article was published 2026-05-04 00:00:00 -0400, which makes this post and me old when I published it.
A lot of popular metaphors involved in the way we talk about AI are about food; like taste, slop, or “home cooked” apps. I think with the further democratization of software, we will have a new class of “gourmet software”.
We go to restaurants to get things that we wouldn’t be bothered to make at home (or even think about), a point that James Hoffman brings up about cafés versus home coffee brewing. In the age of AI software generation what is too much to make by yourself?
Michelin gourmet dining is heavily intertwined with the idea of avant garde molecular gastronomy. This of course is not all Michelin-starred restaurants, but they do like to highlight innovative cuisine. In this same way, I think that we will start to crave more avant garde software. Software that just works is boring. What about software that delights? That makes you think?