If you only used recipes for cooking, do you really know how to cook? I say this as someone who seldom follows a recipe closely (which is why I don't bake), but does following recipes make you a good cook? I'd argue no -- it's all the smaller things: getting the pan to the right temperature, knowing when to turn the heat back down, sensing when to put keep things cooking for a few extra minutes, knowing what to do if things get a tiny bit burnt, adjust to different pans and stoves, etc. Yes, you can cook food by only following a recipe, but good cooks are able to both (a) fill in the gaps where the recipe is not 100% prescriptive and (b) adapt if things don't go 100% according to plan.
I keep thinking about this through the lens of investment frameworks. On one hand, investors (and more generally, most people?) do a bad job of formalizing their thinking into easy-to-digest checklists. Investment frameworks push people to standardize tribal knowledge. (And, if you're a GP looking to raise from institutional money, you need to have some well-defined process, and a framework -- even if light -- accomplishes this.) On the other hand, a purely framework-driven investor would likely miss things.
Whether frameworks alone can drive investment decisions is a core question in AI-driven investment diligence. As an investor, I believe most investors would say "no, there's some human element to it." It's hard to say exactly what they'd miss -- just in the same way you can't teach all the norms of cooking all at once. Sure, you could try to list everything out, but (a) doing that is very hard, (b) it creates an unruly-sized checklist that nobody would follow, and (c) new things always come up. Frustrating to me as a newer investor, but very understandable as someone who cooks a lot. Exceling at the earlier stages require a mix of framework, good coaches, and reps.
