What If All Food Was McDonald's?

Imagine a world where McDonald’s is the only restaurant. Every meal, every day, everywhere—nothing but the golden arches. No tacos, no sushi, no homemade pasta. No chile en nogada, no Mexican cuisine, no nada. Just Big Macs, fries, and nuggets.

The food isn’t bad. It’s consistent, predictable, safe. You know exactly what you’ll get in Tokyo or Texas. But it’s always the same. Reliable? Yes. Exceptional? Never.

The McDonald’s-ization of Code

Int the age og AI no one is talking about this: large language models are probabilistic engines trained on average outputs. They predict the most likely next token based on patterns in their training data. By design, they converge toward the median—the safe, the conventional, the unremarkable.

This software tools produce is McDonald’s code. It works. It’s consistent. It’s utterly forgettable.

The Creativity Crisis

The “vibe coding” advocates celebrate speed and accessibility, but they’re trading away something essential. Software isn’t just about functionality it’s about design, about the interactions between human and machine execution. When we remove human creativity from the process, we get functional but soulless systems.

The Chef’s Knife, Not the Chef

This isn’t an argument against using AI. A chef uses knives, but knives don’t cook the meal. They’re tools that amplify skill and creativity, not replace them. The moment you let the AI be the chef, you resign yourself to eating at McDonald’s forever.

Where Is the Chile en Nogada?

Mexican cuisine offers the perfect metaphor for what we’re losing. Chile en nogada isn’t fast food. It’s complex, seasonal, culturally significant. It requires technique, patience, and artistry. Only the randomness and creativity of a mexican can produce this. An LLM trained in spanish dishes from the 19th century and ingredients of the region of puebla of that age will hardly produce a dish so unique like this.

The Cost of Convenience

McDonald’s succeeded because it’s convenient, cheap, and predictable. But nobody celebrates it. Nobody travels the world to experience the Big Mac they can get at home (excepts Amerians).

We should be building software worth celebrating. Software that demonstrates craft, creativity, and human ingenuity. Software that’s memorable.

Don’t settle for McDonald’s. Demand the chile en nogada.