It's a fluff piece.
Here, though: if you though that piece was fluffy, I'll give you an antidote. The single best cooking video on the Internet:
The great thing is you can make chicken stock with it. Add the chicken stock to the pilaf rice you're making, which goes great with the chicken!
You can look at 16000 source code files, perhaps with a decent search engine, and with some heuristics and guts copy and paste into an app. This is the exact clone to the ml and mg of stir fry recipe #1415
Or you can learn some syntax and techniques and idioms and just kind whip something together out of thin air. No one has ever made a stir fry quite like this one, probably ever.
Cooking is just like coding. Oh and the two options, both for coding and cooking, are not binary exclusive BTW. And some things like pastry or food safety you can't just make up on the fly and expect success, there's always some mix and match.
To say this NYT app makes a strong statement on one side of the debate while ignoring the other is an understatement. I think it does a disservice to cooks and coders to not at least mention the alternative strategy.
You can make a mcdonalds burger with a formal detailed recipe. You cannot make a gourmet meal that way, in my opinion.
"A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects." -Robert A. Heinlein