Coding is like cooking? Sounds strange, eh? But listen, here’s my point.
Imagine the kitchen to be your working environment and the meal to be a feature request. As long as the kitchen is clean, all ingredients, seasonings, and tools are well organized and your tools are modern and functional: You can easily cook the meal, assuming you can cook (or code). Now imagine a kitchen that has no free space because there are dishes and leftovers all around. Your ingredients are not where they are supposed to be and your tools are also cluttered. The next meal (a new feature) is now problematic to make. You don’t have time to clean up the kitchen, and if you do, you will be late. So you decide to work in that mess (technical debt). Instead of just creating the meal, you have to make as much room as necessary, search for your tools, and improvise because you can’t find everything you need. The tool you have just used is again lost somewhere in the mess. You might be able to cook the meal (feature), but it will be low quality and way slower than if your kitchen had just been clean and organized.
Now imagine your menu changes. This means that your old structure isn’t perfect anymore. You need other tools and it might make sense to reorganize your tools and ingredients. In the world of software development, we call this refactoring. Instead of trying to work around your technical debt (the dirty and unorganized kitchen), grant your devs (the cooks) time to clean up and reorganize their kitchen from time to time. Grant them the foundation to be more productive when it matters. Accept a closing day (usually Monday in gastronomy) to avoid technical debt.
The only actual secret for a long-term usable and maintainable application is code refactoring. This means updating to newer programming language versions, maybe using another framework, ditching unused code, cleaning up existing quick solutions, or optimizing them to support your next feature task. If you don’t clean up from time to time, you end up in a dirty kitchen that is a hindrance in the best case and in the worst case it could mean the end of your business (product).
The next time you try to justify refactoring to your boss, try to use this analogy.
And the role of AI? This is up to you in the comments.

Erik Hazington

Technical debt and refactoring are explained through a kitchen analogy: a messy kitchen (technical debt) slows down cooking (feature development), while a clean, organized kitchen enables efficient work. Just as restaurants have closing days for cleaning, development teams need dedicated time for refactoring — updating language versions, removing unused code, and cleaning up quick fixes — to keep a codebase maintainable long-term. The analogy is offered as a way to justify refactoring to non-technical stakeholders.

What coding and cooking have in common

Perfect analogy between software engineering and cooking

Thanks for sharing, a good way to sell the idea of doing good work well.

Nice one! I believe the role of AI ultimately depends on its application. It can either exacerbate existing challenges or help resolve them, depending on how responsibly and effectively it is used.

The lack of end of day clean is criminal when compared to a kitchen where night and morning crews start with a clean.

I’m all for this kind of analogy