Compinche

Recipes leave things unsaid: “a little more”, “until it looks right”, “like that”. The knowledge lives in the person who cooks, and it’s lost when nobody asks. Compinche is an AI apprentice that watches someone cook through a camera. When the cook makes a decision without saying why (turning the heat down, lifting the whisk to look, pressing film onto the béchamel), it asks one short question out loud, at that moment. The cook’s own words become a card, tied to the question and to the moment in the video. The cook confirms or corrects it with their name. Later, someone else makes the dish in their own kitchen, and Compinche teaches back only what was confirmed: It answers by quoting the teacher, and says so when something wasn’t taught. It reminds them just before the step. It measures their pan against the teacher’s. It compares their gesture with the teacher’s demonstration, side by side. The demo is my dad teaching me his béchamel for croquettes, in Spanish, and me learning it in English in my kitchen. The same code, with no recipe-specific changes, followed a Spanish omelette video end to end.