Chef turned systems builder
John Hughes Wilcox, writing as VibeChef.
I’ve spent 20 years leading kitchen teams — building trust under pressure, making split-second calls, and running systems that can’t go down in the middle of a packed service.
“The overlap
is not a metaphor.”
Now I build AI systems the same way. My agent networks aren’t mechanical pipelines. They’re modeled on the way real teams communicate — with hierarchy, trust thresholds, and the ability to improvise when the plan breaks.
The overlap is not a metaphor. Mise en place is systems thinking. Recipe scaling is linear algebra. Inventory is resource allocation. I learned to code to solve kitchen problems. Now the kitchen informs the code.
Mise en place → systems thinking → resilient softwareTwenty years
on the line.
The operating system was forged in kitchens: trust, timing, standards, recovery, and calm when the plan breaks.
Team leadership
Menu development
Texture & flavor systems
Mise en place
Service execution
Costing & food margins
Training & SOPs
Autonomous agent systems
LLM orchestration
API architecture
System state management
Deployment & monitoring
Risk management & sizing
Documentation & protocols
Languages TypeScript, Python, Solidity, Bash
Frontend React, Next.js, Astro, Three.js, Tailwind CSS
AI & Agents Claude / Anthropic, GPT / OpenAI, Gemini, MCP, 30+ Agent Orchestration
Blockchain Hyperliquid SDK, Hardhat, Viem, The Graph, x402, Filecoin / IPFS
Built after
the rush.
Independent products and experiments. Most of what I write about starts here.
Questions, corrections, arguments.
Write back.
I read everything. Replies are slower during service.
johnhugheswilcox@gmail.com ↗