A Ticket Isn't Your Job (That's Just the Order)

A ticket isn’t your job. Just like a chef’s job isn’t order #12.

Chefs don’t just cook that one pasta dish. They keep a kitchen ready, stocked, and optimised for efficiency. That’s the real work.

Professional kitchens have a hierarchy: Head chefs set the direction. Sous chefs own a section, adapt recipes, keep quality. Even line cooks need skill and judgment to deliver at scale. But even the head chefs answer to demand - be it customer tastes, owner’s vision, market trends and or whatever.

While not every developer is a lead, developers are not line cooks either. We don’t just follow recipes. Instead, every ticket is a new problem to be solved. So even the lowest role is much closer to sous chefs: owning a domain, keeping the system healthy, making calls in the moment, and talking with the lead when things no longer run smoothly.

And similarly to a head chef, a lead also has to work within the vision of someone else. The head chef might collaborate with an owner to define a menu, plan out the buffet for a special event and so on. We bring the craft to make it possible.

Tickets are only guidance. Most of the job is the kitchen: codebase, infrastructure, skills, knowledge. Neglect that, and delivery will collapse - sooner or later.

What about AI?

Sure, it can cook a dish. But can it taste while cooking? A chef adjusts seasoning mid-stir. Feels when the sauce is about to break. Knows the onions need thirty more seconds just by looking at them.

AI follows a recipe perfectly and literally, but it can’t feel when something’s off. It can’t guarantee a curated, tasteful outcome when asked to deviate even slightly from the recipe. It can’t pivot mid-process when the approach isn’t working. It won’t step back and ask: “Are we solving the right problem?”, and can’t ask the right questions when it should. It doesn’t understand the vision, with all the nuances and implied context left unwritten.

The feedback loop of a human is immediate. No waiting for approval or validation. And that’s the key difference: judgment in the moment and judgment about the moment itself.

Give it three tickets, it executes three tickets. Maybe even in parallel. A developer sees three tickets and might say: “Wait, if the goal is X, we should build one system, not three features.” or “Maybe we have to rethink auth entirely to fix this permission issue.”

It’s not just craft - but strategy. It’s the taste, experience, reflection, vision and empathy that guides the process that only a human can have. because it’s ultimately about fulfilling some human’s need. At best, AI can be trained to be good enough at fooling us into thinking it does all of that by constructing rube goldberg machines. But it just doesn’t.

It can only be a tool. Not a knife, pan or stove, but a machine you program. And machines need maintenance, add costs and still require human intervention and supervision. So sometimes it’s cheaper - and better - to just have a good chef.

That’s why AI will not make developers obsolete and why doing Jira tickets is not the job.

… and also why 2 good devs beat a dozen line cooks.