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 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 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.

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.

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...