Cooking a steak requires almost no skill. Put it in a hot pan, wait a little, flip it, and eventually you’ll have something technically edible. But a genuinely good steak, medium-rare from edge to edge, browned properly, seasoned right, consistently delicious, is a different matter entirely. Software development with AI is starting to feel much the same. We build nonstop now. With AI, without AI, during the commute, on the toilet, probably in our sleep. We create agents, harnesses, tools, skills, prompts, feedback loops, elaborate workflows. Then 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. And what do we want? We want the perfect steak. We want software that works, looks good, feels polished, and arrives exactly as we imagined it. Most of all, we want the same result every time. Do we get it? Not every time. Not even close to every time. Sometimes the model hands us something surprisingly good.…