I Got an AI-Powered Robot Chef to Cook My Sad Little Man Dinners. Here’s Why I’m So Fond of It.

5 min read

For all the lofty threats about AI upending the world—reinventing warfare, replacing human actors, optimizing your golf swing—the crisis dudes like me face on a Tuesday evening is much simpler: What sad little thing am I going to make tonight so I can go lie down?

There are exactly three meal-prep foods that I have on rotation: shredded beef, shredded pork, and, you guessed it, shredded chicken. All of these involve exactly two steps: Putting spices on a meat, and putting that meat into a crockpot. Every other dinner is leftovers or sandwich meat.

Although I still have to prep ingredients, Posha does most of the work for me.

Don’t say I haven’t tried. During the pandemic, I went through a jerky phase. I’ve sampled most of the meal prep boxes. In 2023, I signed up for a two-week, $2,000 French cooking class. I know what a beurre blanc is now, for what it’s worth. I just don’t have the patience to learn any more cooking skills. If our AI overlords can free me from my eternal three-meat rotation, that’d be swell.

I laid eyes on a cooking robot called Posha. The $1,500 countertop machine looks like a microwave gone premium. It’s, say, 20 percent bigger, with an induction base, wide nonstick pot, and mechanical arm with three stirring attachments. From below, the reservoir pumps oil and water through a spout. On top, a rotating spice rack automatically doles out everything from salt to garam masala, no measurement required. A camera, which sits directly above the cooking area, takes pictures of the food in real time. That may sound creepy, but it’s a crucial part of the system. Posha uses AI to decide if the onions are browned or the eggs are just the right level of gooey.

“It’s sort of the same technology that self-driving cars use,” says co-founder Raghav Gupta. “It uses perceptive AI to perceive, reason, and then act.”

By following Posha’s instructions, I’m able to eat pretty good meals every night of the week.

Take, for instance, cooked potatoes. The recipe called for a small dice, but this is America, and only the largest, most rugged, skin-on chops will do. The camera scanned my powerful, masculine-cut spuds, then used that info to decide how fast to stir them so they would cook properly. Too fast, they don’t cook. Too slow, they’ll burn. Praise be to the robot, they came out crisp and golden-brown.

All of this decision-making is built on a huge library of live cooking data that the Posha team put together over two years, using real chefs and sous-chefs. Their model is proprietary, which means your data isn’t run through ChatGPT or other large-language modes, says Gupta. Not that I was really worried. They can have my food pics for all I care.

Here’s the bad news: I did still have to chop and prep. A lot of people think that’s the worst part of cooking. I disagree. On an average day, for an average meal, doing the cooking—frying veggies, figuring out how much spice is a pinch, looking up the temperature when chicken is done—takes way more brainpower than chopping some onions. (That’s also my argument against all the meal-prep boxes, by the way.)

Instead, the robot just tells me to chop onions, and then it’ll do a pretty good job regardless of whether my dice was small, medium, or lazy. It has a cook-along mode, which starts cooking even if you don’t have all the ingredients ready to go. I preferred that to schedule mode, which I’m sure someone better at planning might find useful, but yours truly was flying on vibes.

Once my ingredients go in, I could and did just walk away. The machine pushed updates to the app, including live pictures of my culinary handiwork. That also included notifications if the machine needed “HUMAN ASSISTANCE,” which it did from time to time.

Case in point: dry-spiced potatoes, also known as potato poriyal. I put the potatoes into the little plastic delivery tub, but by the time I was ready to get moving, they had stuck to the bottom. Posha smacked itself over and over again with surprising strength until it begged me, a superior being, to end the spasm. This happened a few times, and pretty soon I was thinking of that weirdly powerful art piece about a robot whose only purpose was to squeegee up its own slowly-leaking blood. The potatoes still tasted delicious, though.

The robot arm keeps ingredients moving in the pan.

Another powerful thing about my robot was its potential for high-protein meal prep. The cool little touch screen showed pretty much all the macro info I wanted—carbs, fat, protein, calories—and the info was super helpful to weed out the less gains-oriented recipes. That said, the numbers are a rough guess based on an assumption that the user is sticking to their weights and amounts, which I certainly did not.

Instead, I was using whatever I had around. The robot wants six ounces of chicken for pad thai? Let’s call that a breast. Seven ounces of noodles? That’s obviously whatever is left in this pack. The robot didn’t seem to care. The pad thai was slated at 673 calories, 24g of fat, 31g protein, and 83g carbs. I threw some extra chicken in there to protein-maxx, then set that bad boy to the max servings, four. The food lasted for a week, and it was pretty good the whole time.

If you haven’t figured it out by now, I aimed for “pretty good.” Chicken fajitas with veggies were pretty good. Pho was pretty good. Breakfast bowl eggs were a little dry the first time, but when I changed the settings, they too were pretty good. The Thai red curry and breakfast frittatas were better than good—they were straight up great.

Suddenly, I, the human who once microwaved a Sour Patch Kid on top of an Oreo, managed to make curry from scratch. Nobody died, got sick, or went hungry. Unlike other AI devices, Posha solved for competence, and at this point, I’m kind of fond of it. My sister told me she thought the robot was stupid, and I was offended. My mom called it my “little helper,” and I didn’t disagree. The company asked me if I wanted to give the test unit back, and my response was hell no.

This, my friends, is the fabled promise of AI: a life-improving technology that insinuated itself into my routine, turned me against my loved ones, and made me unreasonably smug about a skill I didn’t earn. There are no hallucinations, no delivery drones, no sexy anime chatbots. Just a solid hot meal next Tuesday, mostly put together by a robot who isn’t me. It’s making butter chicken next.