Now that we have stoves at home, restaurants are doomed

I woke one morning feeling fully rested. I was up and about, yearning for something nice to eat. My old routine had been broken. I had left my high-paying job for a startup I co-founded, and it was barely six AM. I usually stopped at the cafeteria at work and grabbed a fresh bagel with cream cheese, but now I was home and would have to buy my own bagel. I walked to the kitchen and found my well-stocked fridge and thought, "Maybe I should just make my own breakfast."

I cracked two eggs. They sizzled sunny-side up on the buttery pan. I sprinkled them with salt and pepper—I'm a simple man. Then I got a slice of provolone, layered it on one egg, then carefully flipped the other egg, sandwiching the cheese between them. The toaster ejected two slices of bread that I then covered with a thin layer of unsalted butter. I placed the eggs between the toast, sliced it into two halves, sat at the table, and took the first bite.

I immediately grabbed my phone, went to Amazon, and ordered an insulated lunch bag. If my breakfast tasted this good, it was a good idea to start making my own food for lunch.

I'm no chef, but I made a delicious lunch: smoked salmon with avocado and cheese. For dinner, I made chicken fried rice. It had eggs, green onions, cilantro, and chicken breast. I made a little garlic sauce that I found online. It was full of flavor. I could eat this every day for the rest of my life. I had a stove, an oven, and even a grill at home. Why would I ever need to go to a restaurant again?

I enjoyed making these meals, and the ingredients were much healthier than whatever I had been eating before. I felt rejuvenated. There was a restaurant I used to love called Le Petit Beurre. At my old job, I'd go there with my co-workers and order the three-taco meal: one shrimp and two carne asada. It was delicious and cost a fortune—well, at least if you added up everything I spent there. But I could make my own tacos now. The smell of shrimp sizzling in olive oil, lemon, onion, salt, and pepper—I'm salivating just thinking about it. The only part I didn't like so much was cleaning the pots and pans afterward, but it was a price I was willing to pay.

What are restaurants good for if we all have a stove at home? With the Internet, we have enough recipes to never eat the same thing twice. Ingredients bought at the grocery store are fresher and more affordable. I may have been the last person to discover this superpower, but I was pretty sure it was only a matter of time before all restaurants went bankrupt. I don't just mean restaurants, though—I mean fast food, food trucks, delis. Why would you go to them if you could make your own food at a fraction of the cost?

My startup was featured on TechCrunch. We got our first seed investment. We celebrated. We were a team of five and went to a fancy restaurant in downtown LA. While we were discussing our next steps, I couldn't help but think about how I would cook mussels at home. Maybe I'd make them with garlic, red peppers, lemon juice, and butter. Hmm, where would I buy the mussels, though?

I never made mussels at home. In fact, I spent less and less time in my kitchen. We started ordering food in the office while we crunched code day in and day out. I'd feel guilty anytime I stopped by a restaurant to pick up my order on the way to a client meeting. I'd eat in the car with my co-founder while we discussed strategy. I'd get home late, get to work early, and grab a Starbucks along the way. We worked hard and thought little of food. Ramen quickly became part of my daily diet.

The startup failed. I got a job and got married. I have twin boys. I also own a stove, twin ovens, a grill, and more recently, an air fryer. I barely step into the kitchen. Whenever I make sunny-side-up eggs for my kids, they tell me Grandma's eggs are better. Oh, they are so much better.

I'm actually a pretty lousy cook. For most of my life, I cooked for one. I learned pretty early that I am my main and only target audience. No one raved about my food; instead, they endured it because it was the only thing available. Food is not my personality. I eat because I must. For the most part, I eat once or twice a day, with no snacks in between. But the change in my routine helped me discover a power that was in my own hands: the ability to cook for myself. The oven was like discovering ChatGPT. I didn't need an establishment with a high bar of entry to make my meals anymore. Instead, I could just turn on the stove, heat a pan, throw in some ingredients conveniently located in the fridge, and eat. Maybe I was a bit too impressed with myself and didn't care much for the taste, but at least I was fed.

Whenever I hear that AI is going to take over programming jobs, I think about my little stint in the kitchen. Yes, AI can write code. It looks great on its own. But when you expose that code to the world—the same way vibe coders submit PRs to open-source projects—it gets loudly rejected. In fact, the curl project developers made an announcement banning all LLM-generated code. Imagine your cooking being so bad that someone feels the need to make an announcement.

We blamed several layoffs on the rise of AI, most companies are hardly using it internally. They often write a very public manifesto that serves as PR and promotion for the author. But the reality is they'll just get a license for copilot and call it a day.

There is such a thing as tech influencers these days. Someone who knows how to code, and has a large following of non coders who like his personality. When he repeats the idea of vibe coding, it generates enough noise to create a movement. Even if it's all just hot air behind it. They make money, show it off, and now we all have to start vibe coding.

When you have an oven and a stove at home, you can basically do everything a restaurant can do. Why would you waste your money going to a restaurant? Yes, restaurants are not the best business to get into, they hardly pay their workers. But they aren't going anywhere. In fact, there are more than 500 new restaurants opening every year in the US, despite knowing that everyone has a stove at home.

So yeah, we all have ovens at home, but I doubt programmers are going to lose their jobs over it.