Anyone can cook (and the kitchen is opening up too)
At a quarterly meeting in our group last week, senior leadership made the expectation clear: everyone should be using agentic tooling to build apps that solve problems they actually have. Not just engineers. Everyone.
The Ratatouille line keeps surfacing for me, and for my tech lead, who reached for it independently. “Anyone can cook,” Gusteau said. Anton Ego refined it later: “a great cook can come from anywhere.” More are growing into great cooks than I’d have guessed, and a great one can show up from anywhere, including, in the film, a rat.
Agentic tooling is doing the same thing for code. The barrier to writing something that runs has dropped sharply. Someone in operations or marketing can describe what they want and watch a working prototype appear. That part is exciting and worth taking seriously.
The same tooling opens the rest of the stack to people who don’t ship code. Someone who only saw the front end can now ask grounded questions about source, security, and pipeline. The kitchen is becoming visible from the dining room.
But code is one part of a meal. A restaurant kitchen has consistent supply, food safety, plating, and prep timing. Software at scale needs the equivalent: architecture that won’t fold under load, security review, repeatable deployment, observability, requirements that don’t shift under you.
Not every meal goes on the same menu. A marketing team’s prototype doesn’t need the architecture, security, and operations of customer-facing enterprise software. If it’s a prototype, there’s no end to own. If it’s meant to be more, build for ownership from day one. The same tooling can help you reason about its security and deployment, with the production kitchen alongside when stakes are real. A half-cooked plate handed off later leaves the rest of the work with the production kitchen. When more people own their plates from the start, the gap between their work and the production kitchen’s narrows.
Tooling investment is uneven. Most energy goes to prompt-to-code; less to prompt-to-security-review or prompt-to-deployment. The kitchen is becoming legible faster than it’s becoming agentic.
I’m watching teams cross-skill vertically. Developers picking up bits adjacent to code that AI now puts in reach. People in business roles asking grounded questions about parts of the stack they previously only saw the front of, and acting on more of their own ideas.
A great cook can come from anywhere. A working restaurant takes a team that reads the whole kitchen and shares the plating more than it used to.