The Legendary Spatula

Adapted from a post I wrote on my Instagram story in April 2026.

When I look at all the programs being churned out left and right by coding agents, I sometimes think of the SpongeBob episode with the legendary spatula.

In that episode, SpongeBob faces the Flying Dutchman in a cooking contest. With flashy magic, the Dutchman conjures up hundreds of burgers in an instant. SpongeBob, by contrast, makes a single burger, slowly and with great care. It looks like the Dutchman has won, but when the crowd bites into his perfectly normal-looking burgers, they recoil in disgust. The burgers taste awful. As the crowd jeers in anger, the Dutchman protests that SpongeBob’s burger must be even worse. But once he tastes SpongeBob’s genuinely delicious burger, the Dutchman concedes defeat.

With a coding agent, knocking out a single feature is quick. Bolt on a little more and you’ve got something that passes for a real service. The act of making is getting lighter and lighter. And yet, among all the things made this way, not many actually stay in use. They clearly run, they seem to have no problems, and yet somehow you never grow attached to them.

Some products, as you use them, give you the sense that someone agonized over them for a long time. A single button, a single sentence, a single flow connects naturally to the next. The difference seems trivial, and yet that very triviality is sometimes what keeps you coming back. Sometimes it isn’t even a matter of speed or features at all.

Something similar is happening in the arts. Now anyone can easily produce a good-looking image or video. But those works don’t necessarily stick in your memory—like one of those AI promotional videos a government office puts out.

The arrival of the age of mass production hasn’t erased the value of the handmade. If anything, now that similar things can be made quickly anywhere, the difference made by something slower and more deeply considered has only grown sharper. What we’re living through now is a moment when it’s intangible products, not physical ones, that are undergoing this shift in how they’re made.

The act of making something is getting easier. If that’s the case, then in the end the difference that remains will likely come not from how quickly you made it, but from how long you thought about it. Just as mass production didn’t erase the value of the handmade but rather brought it into relief, won’t the age of agents likewise end up making the value of the well-made even more vivid? How long that will hold, I can’t say… but who will turn out to be worthy of the legendary spatula?