Small crumbles

Last night was Tuesday, which means cooking class. The assignment: biscuits and gravy.

I dumped my pound of sausage into the hot skillet. The chef had said to break it into small crumbles, but I wanted a big, satisfying chunk of pork in every bite. I was going to improve on this recipe. The wooden spoon I'd grabbed wasn't exactly a precision tool for the job, but that was fine. I had a vision.

The meat began to brown beautifully as I mashed it into hearty chunks, fully convinced I knew what I was doing. The chef glanced over but said nothing. I took that as approval.

Then came the roux. I added a small amount of flour, stirred it in, added the rest of the flour, then the milk. The gravy cooked down to a thick consistency, similar to a jello just before it sets. Rich, heavy, clinging to the spoon. I looked at it and thought: nailed it.

I hurried home to share the meal with my fiancée, who does all of the cooking at home and has worked in more kitchens than I've eaten in. She took one look at the gravy, gave it a slow stir, and began asking questions about my process.

The calm, measured questions of someone who already knows the answer.

"How big did you break up the sausage?"

"Did you have a good pool of grease before you added the flour?"

"...Did you say it looked like jello?"

We landed on the chunked sausage. She explained it gently, the way you explain something to someone who is proud of what they've made. The big chunks had soaked up all the flour. Without small crumbles, the fat never properly rendered out into the pan, so there was no pool of grease to build a roux. When the flour went in, it didn't dissolve into a smooth base. It soaked straight into the meat like a sponge. When the milk followed, it had nothing to bind to evenly. The gravy thickened, sure, but in lumps and patches instead of a silky, pourable sauce. And the insides of those proud, chunky pieces? They may not have fully cooked through.

Every confident decision I had made was wrong. Not catastrophically wrong. The meal was edible, even delicious in its own stubborn way. But it could have been so much better if I'd just listened to the process.

Now flip the skillet around. This is exactly what we see at work, where people bring us the automations they've built on our platform.

They come to us proud. They've built something, maybe with an AI assistant, maybe by cobbling together tutorials and Stack Overflow threads and sheer determination. And it "works." It runs, it produces output, it might even look pretty good at first glance. They dump it on the table the same way I did, beaming: look at the slop I made.

The problems are the same as my gravy. They skipped the foundational steps. They never rendered the fat. They didn't break the problem into small pieces so each part could do its job. They went straight for the big, satisfying chunks: the features, the UI, the thing they could point at and say I built that. So the logic is tangled into the implementation the same way my flour got trapped in the meat. It technically thickened. It technically works. But it's lumpy, it's fragile, and there's a real chance something in the middle isn't fully cooked.

Our job isn't to tell them their gravy is bad. It was edible. It was even delicious in its own way. Our job is to be the supportive teacher: stir it, ask the right questions, help them understand why the chef said to make small crumbles. Not to crush the enthusiasm that got them cooking in the first place, but to channel it. The boring steps they skipped (the rendering, the roux, the infrastructure underneath) are what separate a meal that works from a meal that sings.

Because the best part of my story isn't that I got it wrong. It's that I'll make it again. And next time, I'll make small crumbles.