Curiosity Has Leverage Now

I am not a developer.

Building software was always intimidating to me. It was like walking into a place where everyone spoke a language you didn’t understand. There is a natural human element that makes that uncomfortable.

I’ve always been curious about technology, but software seemed different. A lot of if-then statements, logic, code, and systems that I didn’t really understand.

I was interested, but I was on the outside looking in.

That has changed over the last few years.

And maybe the biggest thing I’ve learned is that ferocious curiosity is a superpower. The tools we have today just gave that curiosity leverage.

Why Food? Zap Cooking started with a pretty basic idea.

Food transcends culture.

War or peace, everyone has to eat. It is the basic fuel for our bodies, but it is also at the center of so much of the human experience.

Family traditions. Thanksgiving. An annual cookout. A night out with friends. Your grandmother’s recipe.

Food is at the baseline of our social and tribal experience.

That was always interesting to me. How could we build something around that?

That curiosity eventually brought us to Nostr.

What interested me about Nostr was portable identity.

Traditional social media asks you to create a different version of yourself everywhere you go. You have your Instagram face, Facebook for your local community, LinkedIn for work.

Nostr was different.

You had a key that represented you, and that identity could move with you.

I didn’t understand everything about it. I still don’t. But instinctively, it felt like something different. Almost like a new layer of the internet.

So we started building around food.

Then we kept pulling the thread.

Bitcoin Became Useful I had been in Bitcoin since 2020, but mostly as someone who held it.

Then Zaps came to Nostr in 2023.

We started having Zapathons and sending tiny amounts of Bitcoin back and forth just for fun. Someone shared something useful, you zapped them. Someone posted something funny, zap.

I went from making a few Bitcoin transactions in my life to sometimes making several in a day.

That changed my perspective.

Bitcoin wasn’t just something you held anymore. It became a simple way to move value between people.

That eventually became another part of Zap Cooking.

What if you could share a recipe and someone could send you value directly?

Another thread.

Then AI Changed Everything The biggest shift for me personally came in late 2025.

I took over the Zap Cooking repo from the developer I had been working with.

At the time, even that felt like a big deal.

I had to learn the workflow. GitHub. Builds. Deployments. Backend services. Errors. All the stuff that previously looked like another language.

At first it was slow.

Then something happened.

It started becoming normal.

I would ask AI questions. Try something. Break it. Figure out why it broke. Fix it. Test it. Move to the next thing.

Eventually the workflow became second nature.

I wasn’t suddenly a software engineer. I’m still not.

But I could build.

That distinction is important.

AI shortened the distance between I wonder if this is possible and let’s try it. And once you experience that a few times, you start looking at problems differently.

Not knowing how to do something stops being the reason not to do it.

It just becomes the next thing you need to figure out.

AI Doesn’t Do All the Work There is also this idea that if something is “vibe coded,” it isn’t real.

I don’t buy that.

AI makes it incredibly easy to start building software. Maintaining software is another story.

Things break all the time.

Bugs show up. Dependencies change. Security needs reviewed. Payments create another level of complexity. App stores have their own requirements. Something that worked yesterday doesn’t always work tomorrow.

Keeping a real product running requires work.

If anything, this experience has given me a deeper respect for developers.

At first, I wondered if AI was going to devalue the technical skills developers spent years learning.

Instead, I’ve watched great developers grab the harness and go even faster.

If these tools give me leverage as a non-developer, imagine the leverage they give someone with ten or twenty years of technical experience.

That is where things get really interesting.

Being a Generalist Has Helped I’ve spent my career working across different areas, so I’ve always been a generalist.

I think that has actually helped me here.

I don’t always look at something as a software problem.

I look at it as a user problem.

Why is this hard?

Why does someone need six clicks to do this?

Why can’t these things connect?

Why does the user need to understand the technology underneath it?

That last question has become especially important for Zap Cooking.

For a long time, we marketed the technology.

AI. Bitcoin. Nostr.

The problem is most people don’t care.

Someone standing in their kitchen at 5:30 trying to figure out dinner isn’t thinking about decentralized protocols.

They want dinner.

That realization has changed our strategy.

Simplify Everything Our direction with Zap Cooking is becoming much clearer.

Simplify cooking.

Help people find recipes, plan meals, use what’s in their pantry, understand nutrition, waste less food, and build their grocery list.

Simplify Bitcoin.

Easy backups. Easy restore. Easy peer-to-peer payments. Let Bitcoin work underneath the product without requiring someone to understand everything happening behind the scenes.

Simplify social.

Share food. Discover recipes. Meet people. Support creators. Build connections around something real.

AI, Bitcoin and Nostr are still underneath everything we’re doing.

But they aren’t the product.

The experience is the product.

That took us a while to understand.

The Community Built This Too Zap Cooking has never been something I built alone.

Everyone who uploaded a recipe, tagged us, tested something, sent a Zap, reported a bug, gave us an idea or told us something sucked has contributed to where we are today.

Community has been essential.

And maybe that’s fitting.

We started with food because food connects people.

Three years later, connection is still at the center of what we’re trying to build.

In February 2026, we launched our membership program. That was another important moment for me.

For years, we really didn’t know how we were going to make money from this.

Membership gave us a path.

We’re still early and we still have to prove the value, but that is the point.

Putting a price on something doesn’t make it valuable.

You have to earn that.

Curiosity Beats Compliance I have no idea what technology looks like three to five years from now.

Nobody does.

But people are still going to eat.

They’re going to cook.

They’re going to care about their health.

Families will have traditions.

Friends will sit around tables.

People will want community and connection.

Those things aren’t going away.

So we keep building around the fundamentals.

I’ve never considered myself an academic, but I’ve always been curious.

I want to know why.

I want to understand how something works.

And increasingly, I want to see what happens if we try something.

I think about this a lot in education too.

We have systems that often reward knowing the answer and following the instructions.

The world we’re moving into may reward something very different.

Ask the question.

Try something.

Break it.

Figure out why it broke.

Try again.

Curiosity beats compliance. And there is another part of this that matters.

You have to become a little unembarrassable.

Ask the stupid question.

Admit you don’t know.

Build something that might fail.

Put something into the world before you’re completely comfortable with it.

You’re going to be wrong sometimes.

I am wrong all the time.

But the fear of looking stupid keeps a lot of people from ever walking into the room.

Three years ago, much of what we’ve built with Zap Cooking would have seemed impossible for me to build.

Today, we’re building across web and mobile, integrating AI, Bitcoin, social, payments, nutrition, meal planning, grocery planning and more.

And we’re still figuring it out.

That’s probably the lesson.

You don’t have to know exactly how you’re going to get there.

You just need enough curiosity to start pulling the thread.

The tools didn’t give me curiosity.

They gave my curiosity leverage. Be curious enough to enter the room.

Be unembarrassable enough to fail once you’re there.

Then keep going.

You might be surprised by what you can will into existence.