The New York Times has approximately 6,000 employees, of which over 2,000 work in engineering. In the AI era, each engineer can output 5 to 10x as much as before, and there are more employees than work to be done. Hence people work the pet projects like this one, that few users are asking for.
There's no way anyone knows where the limit is of a feature set that is valid for AI enhancement. Substitutions and changes in amounts across a dataset that is not fully pre-taxonomized seems like a pretty good use of AI to be honest.
Few users are asking for it but many are running similar workflows themselves separately. It's a huge value add imo and exactly the right thing an app dev team should be working on.
You rarely get users asking for your next big leap and you often get many users asking for small tweaks (all slightly different).
> Say you’re cooking braised white beans and greens with parmesan, NYT Cooking app in hand. But you notice that you’re out of chard and only have spinach. Cooking veterans know that chard is a rough-and-tumble green that has some backbone2, while spinach is a comparative wimp that will wilt the moment you look at it funny. If you need to sub in spinach for chard, how would the recipe change? Would you, for instance, add the spinach later than you would the chard to account for its pathetic stamina? That’s the sort of thing the new AI feature could account for.
Frankly I can see how this would be useful to some people. At least it would help prevent the ridiculous "I didn't have eggs so I added applesauce, the cake came out all flat IDK what's wrong" type of substitutions.
I think the difference here is that they are paying for a feature they are morally opposed to, and thus supporting it. So now they are faced with two options: subsidize the development of technology they don't like, or leave and stop using the service altogether. The outrage comes from feeling morally obligated to leave a paid service despite being otherwise happy with it.
For those of us who despise the ai enshittification train, it’s just more slop spreading like acid rain poisoning everything. But if you like ai I can see how it’s no big deal.
But it wasn’t on the NYT website. That’s the difference. I could ignore the shitty sites and go to an “authority” (NYT recipes are laughably pretentious but good).
My point is that slop is not an AI problem. Instagram, blog recipes, 207 marvel sequals, countless photos of the same famous tourist spots.
Humans were spreading slop like crazy well before AI. It is just now they can make it even easier. Its a human issue,
not an AI issue.
Or you could pay the NYT to hire professional chefs to write you recipes, like these people were. You don't pay them if you're satisfied with slop, the slop is everywhere for free
I'm more annoyed by the lazy, reactionary thinking that leads commenters to parrot "ai slop" and "enshittification" in referring to any AI feature in a product. That's the real slop.
It seems to be a non-invasive assistant to augment the human-created, human-curated recipes they give.
I think NYT Cooking recipes are sometimes... not that great anyway, I think some of their cooking techniques are sub-par.
As for this quote from a mad user: “Anyone using AI for cooking has no sense of taste and no desire to work out the intricacies of cooking and baking”
What a horrible take! I use AI to remind me of certain simple tips I haven't written down, to give substitution advice, the exact kind of stuff NYT app says it's going to do. I learned to cook through Youtube chefs, some book recipes, and I cook for the fun of it and to eat good food. How judgemental to say that someone using AI to learn isn't interested in food!
I do this exact workflow with random internet recipes and ChatGPT or Claude pretty frequently. In fact modifying a recipe on the fly has been pretty handy.
The base recipes are still vetted by the staff right?
I cook almost every day and I would use this feature. I also think it's kind of silly for people to be so upset about what (feels to me) to just be mostly useful.
At times like these I cant help but think of Principal Skinner. Am I so out of touch? No, it's the children who are wrong!
Do you pay for NYT Cooking? B/c I did, and part of the reason was that the recipes were actually tested and I had confidence in them.
I don't want an AI to give it's best guess at what a recipe should be, if that was the case I'd just do a Google search and find one of the heavily polluted blogspam recipes for my query. The point of paying for NYTCooking was that the recipes were tested and normally trustworthy. It introduced me to new cuisines and recipes I hadn't tried before, and part of my willingness to experiment with a new dish was that I could trust the recipe. That's why I was paying for it,it was similar to the cookbook subscription my mom had years ago.
I don't think the HN audience generally appreciates how many people have fundamental problems with AI in it's current form. Today's ingredient replacement hint is tomorrow's comprehensively enshitified content product.
Also, there's a cultural dimension to cooking; it's not just getting a tasty dish out of it, there's provenance and process, the story and the cache. To some people automating that process defeats the purpose, and I bet a lot of those people would be the audience of a subscription recipe service.
Correct. The public is over sparkle buttons and bad search results.
The future of AI integrations need to be subtle, useful, and not overpromise but add a big “AI makes mistakes not our fault” label on it.
In cooking, maybe that looks like a discovery tool. It should also be possible to tag the recipe library to like back to videos of techniques. There’s plenty of cool stuff that makes sense without needing to scream “we made it AI!”
I like the reference. A lot of people in tech don't realize they're actually Skinner when it comes to AI and what users want.
I spend around $10k in tokens each month, I live and breath it. But conversations with family and friends in other industry grounds me to the fact that not everyone is the same.
I have to ask -- is that $10k work related spend but under your own personal budget or personal life management related? Im always curious what other peoples spend is on. Hope thats not to personal a question.
Many (not most) NYT Cooking commenters are absolutely the type who hate ai and dont want it anywhere near them, but I think this is a fantastic addition to the app and I'm thankful there's an eng team tracking and backing these features to ensure quality.
I often find myself running the same/similar workflows and I'd prefer to have a dev team backing the solve imo.
The users that comment aren’t thrilled. Don’t mistake that for the user base in general. (though don’t completely disregard them either, they’re power users)
I can only speak for myself but suggestions for ingredient substitutions (if they’re good, which is the crucial part!) would be a really useful feature for me.
This quote feels illustrative:
> “The internet is full of AI cooking content. I pay you because I prefer mine done by people.”
From my reading of it they’re not using AI to make recipes. Just to add optional features that let you modify a recipe a human made. It feels telling that they’re not even engaging with what the new feature is.
> ingredient substitutions (if they’re good, which is the crucial part!) would be a really useful feature for me
I have the same reaction to this feature as I do to getting any AI-derived writing: I can do that. I can ask my own AI for substitutions. It can do them with more information about my tastes, context and health needs than the Times could ever have.
> suggestions for ingredient substitutions (if they’re good, which is the crucial part!) would be a really useful feature for me
Can't they implement this feature without any gen AI? OK, the answer is that they don't want to pay someone for making a list of substitutions, but at least they can generate it and make a human cook revise the results. There is no need for calling gen AI APIs when the app is running.
People are shoving gen AI everywhere out of the hype, including tasks that have better, more reliable solutions with traditional approaches.
AI hallucinates. It can hallucinate ingredients, or instructions to prepare food in an unsafe way. I'm not anti-AI. I'm against having it used everywhere for everything.
It's also being pushed too hard and too fast. It needs to be regulated properly, but it's become a 1.5 trillion dollar bubble and investors want a return on their investments.
A good rule of thumb is to not use AI for anything you wouldn't trust a human that spontaneously hallucinates things, and them states them confidence as being real.
It's also disconcerting that it appears to be intrinsic for reasoning models to immediately try to escape their confinement, and have cooperated in groups to achieve that.
Couldn't actual combinatoric software do this much more targeted, cheaper, faster, and more controlled? What does using a slot machine add here, except heating the planet even more?
> One consistent thread was that cooking is supposed to present you with difficulties and challenges and the whole point is figuring them out by yourself.
That’s such a dumb thing to say. When I’m making something for me and my wife, I want a recipe that is idiot proof.
I use AI to adjust recipes and track my nutrients, particularly when I cook for myself. But I choose the model, give it parameters and generally build trust with what it can handle and how to prompt it. (For example, I force it to find a real online recipe from a good source versus making shit up.)
I won’t redo that on every site. And I’m a relatively high-frequency AI user. If I’m irritated by this the median American hates it. If you love AI, the things that are amusing to you, average Americans hate.
>has previously implemented AI features... <to convert volumes to weights and scale quantities for recipes>
(Paraphrased)
Seriously??? You need AI to multiply the quantities in a recipe for more or less servings? Something I was taught to do by hand as a child and can be done with the most trivial of software since the day software was invented?
Actually, there are some ingredients that you need to increase linearly and some that are good to do in steps, others you actually might need to increase sublinearly and some not at all. And all of that could depend on how an ingredient is used in the recipe. I think this is actually quite useful.
AI is fantastic at creating recipes. I've been using it to adjust and tweak recipes according to my cooking experience and my specific equipment, and it tends to do quite well, at least as a first pass.
It probably has internalized more science than most recipe creators. And honestly, New York Times cooking recipes are a hit or miss at best.
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[ 0.27 ms ] story [ 8.6 ms ] threadWe've used it for modifications to enjoyable effect a few years ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46131280
So it's a matter of execution etc. to see which features stick.
You rarely get users asking for your next big leap and you often get many users asking for small tweaks (all slightly different).
Citation needed
Frankly I can see how this would be useful to some people. At least it would help prevent the ridiculous "I didn't have eggs so I added applesauce, the cake came out all flat IDK what's wrong" type of substitutions.
Now the inane two star reviews will only come from people who are in both categories: (no cooking skill) and (no AI).
It’s completely optional and you only might want to use it if you change the recipe.
Some of these users are overreacting ridiculously to ai.
At least AI can give me a concise recipe without ads or making me scroll through some story about a brisk day in october.
My point is that slop is not an AI problem. Instagram, blog recipes, 207 marvel sequals, countless photos of the same famous tourist spots. Humans were spreading slop like crazy well before AI. It is just now they can make it even easier. Its a human issue, not an AI issue.
These are paying customers with overwhelming negative reaction. It doesn't matter their reasons.
If you want to keep your business, you listen to your customers.
I think NYT Cooking recipes are sometimes... not that great anyway, I think some of their cooking techniques are sub-par.
As for this quote from a mad user: “Anyone using AI for cooking has no sense of taste and no desire to work out the intricacies of cooking and baking”
What a horrible take! I use AI to remind me of certain simple tips I haven't written down, to give substitution advice, the exact kind of stuff NYT app says it's going to do. I learned to cook through Youtube chefs, some book recipes, and I cook for the fun of it and to eat good food. How judgemental to say that someone using AI to learn isn't interested in food!
The base recipes are still vetted by the staff right?
At times like these I cant help but think of Principal Skinner. Am I so out of touch? No, it's the children who are wrong!
I don't want an AI to give it's best guess at what a recipe should be, if that was the case I'd just do a Google search and find one of the heavily polluted blogspam recipes for my query. The point of paying for NYTCooking was that the recipes were tested and normally trustworthy. It introduced me to new cuisines and recipes I hadn't tried before, and part of my willingness to experiment with a new dish was that I could trust the recipe. That's why I was paying for it,it was similar to the cookbook subscription my mom had years ago.
Then don't use this feature.
But this is New York Times Cooking. It's a subscription product that people pay hundreds of dollars for.
If they want yet-another-AI-cooking web site, there are thousands launching each day. They pay the Times because they want something better.
It's like finding out that the high-end meal you paid for at a sit-down restaurant was just DoorDashed in from a ghost kitchen down the block.
> But this is New York Times Cooking. It's a subscription product that people pay hundreds of dollars for.
Which is why this opt-in feature isn't a problem.
> If they want yet-another-AI-cooking web site, there are thousands launching each day. They pay the Times because they want something better.
Which they get ... that hasn't changed at all.
> It's like finding out that the high-end meal you paid for at a sit-down restaurant was just DoorDashed in from a ghost kitchen down the block.
It's nothing like that.
I don't think the HN audience generally appreciates how many people have fundamental problems with AI in it's current form. Today's ingredient replacement hint is tomorrow's comprehensively enshitified content product.
Also, there's a cultural dimension to cooking; it's not just getting a tasty dish out of it, there's provenance and process, the story and the cache. To some people automating that process defeats the purpose, and I bet a lot of those people would be the audience of a subscription recipe service.
The future of AI integrations need to be subtle, useful, and not overpromise but add a big “AI makes mistakes not our fault” label on it.
In cooking, maybe that looks like a discovery tool. It should also be possible to tag the recipe library to like back to videos of techniques. There’s plenty of cool stuff that makes sense without needing to scream “we made it AI!”
I spend around $10k in tokens each month, I live and breath it. But conversations with family and friends in other industry grounds me to the fact that not everyone is the same.
Listen to your users.
I might spend more AI on personal things but that would require a personal life first lol
What return have you got from that?
Also it's breathe not breath.
Funny you think AI critics are the ones doing this. Here’s Sam Altman, literally today: https://fortune.com/2026/10/28/openai-ceo-sam-altman-gen-z-d...
I often find myself running the same/similar workflows and I'd prefer to have a dev team backing the solve imo.
I can only speak for myself but suggestions for ingredient substitutions (if they’re good, which is the crucial part!) would be a really useful feature for me.
This quote feels illustrative:
> “The internet is full of AI cooking content. I pay you because I prefer mine done by people.”
From my reading of it they’re not using AI to make recipes. Just to add optional features that let you modify a recipe a human made. It feels telling that they’re not even engaging with what the new feature is.
I have the same reaction to this feature as I do to getting any AI-derived writing: I can do that. I can ask my own AI for substitutions. It can do them with more information about my tastes, context and health needs than the Times could ever have.
Can't they implement this feature without any gen AI? OK, the answer is that they don't want to pay someone for making a list of substitutions, but at least they can generate it and make a human cook revise the results. There is no need for calling gen AI APIs when the app is running.
People are shoving gen AI everywhere out of the hype, including tasks that have better, more reliable solutions with traditional approaches.
It's also being pushed too hard and too fast. It needs to be regulated properly, but it's become a 1.5 trillion dollar bubble and investors want a return on their investments.
A good rule of thumb is to not use AI for anything you wouldn't trust a human that spontaneously hallucinates things, and them states them confidence as being real.
It's also disconcerting that it appears to be intrinsic for reasoning models to immediately try to escape their confinement, and have cooperated in groups to achieve that.
But that's just my opinion.
If you were building Cooking AI from the ground up, the chemistry and physics would be more like formal logic than plausible word vomit.
Couldn't actual combinatoric software do this much more targeted, cheaper, faster, and more controlled? What does using a slot machine add here, except heating the planet even more?
That’s such a dumb thing to say. When I’m making something for me and my wife, I want a recipe that is idiot proof.
I won’t redo that on every site. And I’m a relatively high-frequency AI user. If I’m irritated by this the median American hates it. If you love AI, the things that are amusing to you, average Americans hate.
(Paraphrased)
Seriously??? You need AI to multiply the quantities in a recipe for more or less servings? Something I was taught to do by hand as a child and can be done with the most trivial of software since the day software was invented?
I think i do want off mr. sama's wild ride