I am sitting here eating a vaguely Mexican-inspired bowl of assorted sauteed vegetables, beans, and spices that looks weird but tastes amazing.
While cooking, I was listening to the recent Better Offline episode with Cal Newport:
I was also thinking about several things. Like how Meta founder and world's most boring chiweenie Mark Zuckerberg claimed, in his recent snoozifesto, that he uses LLMs to generate recipes to cook with his daughter:
https://about.fb.com/news/2026/08/the-future-is-for-everyone/
And about a viral social media post I saw a few years ago, in which an artist posted a picture of a character he had drawn. One of the first comments asked, "What prompt did you use?" The artist replied: "I thought of Jessica and then I drew her."
To that end, beloved readers(FN), here is my "prompt" for making dinner. I use this "prompt" all the time. It works great. It has also never once hallucinated and told me to add glue or rocks to a meal.
I assemble, in order:
Today, this was a large tomato, a small cabbage, and a small zucchini (group 1), and an ear of corn (ft. huitlacoche)
I look at the foods I have assembled. I add:
Today, I added a couple cloves of garlic (group 1) and a can of pinto beans (group 2)
I pull out whatever spices seem necessary. Today, that ended up being cumin, red pepper flakes, paprika, granulated onion, and nutritional yeast.
Cook. (I chose to sautee.)
Revisit steps 1-3 as needed.
"But I don't know how to cook!" someone somewhere will surely say. "How am I supposed to know what ingredients go together or how to cook things?"
Friends, when I moved into my first apartment literally two decades ago, I knew nothing about how to cook. I knew plenty about how NOT to cook. My mother taught me all kinds of ways NOT to cook. (Plain boiled chicken and plain steamed vegetables are her specialties. She thinks this makes her a culinary success because at least she's not burning them like her mother did.)
I learned by checking cookbooks out of the library and following their instructions religiously...until I started to notice certain patterns. Like how garlic, cumin, and paprika are nigh-universal spices that will save nearly any dish, no matter what region of the globe it's from. Or how certain flavor profiles (Italian, Mexican, Indian) are usually fairly predictable. Or how enough spices will save ANYTHING. Or how recipes by Americans inevitably benefit from halving the sugar and doubling the spices. Or that when in doubt, you can always sautee, roast, or air fry and it'll be okay.
My point is, I learned all of this before LLMs even existed. If a time traveler had told me to "just ask ChatGPT" I would have marveled at this utterly useless sentence that had never before been spoken in human history, for lo, never had there been a need. I still marvel today that it is spoken, for lo, there still is no need.
Anyway, cook things. It's fun. And extremely satisfying. My excessively delicious sauteed bean glop is proof of that.
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(FN) I know that my "response to your emails" rate is about 0.02 percent. I apologize. I promise I do read them and love hearing from you.
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