Where I measure, and where I don't
Coffee is weighed to the gram and the cornbread is in cups. That isn't inconsistency, it's the whole idea, and this is the rule behind it.
If you read the Chemex recipe and then the cornbread, you'll notice something. One gives you 55 grams of coffee ground at 3.1, water at 205°F, and a drawdown time. The other says a cup of cornmeal and a tablespoon of sugar.
That isn't carelessness and it isn't drift. It's the site's whole argument, and it's worth saying plainly rather than leaving you to work out.
The rule
Measure where a small difference is detectable. Don't where it isn't.
That's it. Everything else is applying it.
Coffee is the extreme case. Two grams more in a 55-gram dose is a 4% change in strength, and you can taste it. A grind setting one notch finer changes the extraction enough to turn sweetness into bitterness. Water at 195°F and water at 205°F make visibly different cups. At that scale, precision is the only thing standing between you and guessing.
Cornbread is the other end. A tablespoon of sugar either way is a rounding error in a pan of it. Cornmeal absorbs differently by brand and by age, so the exact gram weight was never the variable that decided anything. What decides cornbread is whether the pan was properly hot, and no number tells you that.
What actually matters, by the thing you're cooking
Coffee. Everything. Dose, water, grind, temperature, time. The margins are that tight and every one of them is controllable.
Baking. Weights matter, especially gluten-free, where flours vary enormously in density and a cup of one is not a cup of another. Times matter less than the doneness signal.
Sous vide. Temperature is everything and it's exact. Time is a range, usually a wide one, because the whole point is that it stops mattering once you're there.
Smoking. Internal temperature matters. Clock time is a fiction. A brisket is done when it probes tender and the hours it took are a fact you observe, not a target you hit. A full pit adds one to two hours and no recipe can tell you that in advance.
Sauces and dressings. Ratios matter, quantities don't. 3-2-1-1 is worth knowing by heart; whether that's ounces or cups depends on how many people you're feeding.
Salads, sides, most vegetables. Almost nothing is exact. Taste it and adjust. This is where the cooking actually happens.
Why this isn't a cop-out
The temptation with a site like this is to measure everything, because numbers look authoritative. A recipe with weights to the gram for a green salad reads as rigorous and is actually theater: it's precision in a place where it buys you nothing, and it teaches you to follow rather than to taste.
The opposite temptation is to say cooking is intuition and numbers ruin it. That's how people spend three years making mediocre coffee.
Both are avoidable by asking one question before you write a number down: if this were 10% different, would anybody notice?
What that means for reading this site
Where you see a number, it's there because I tested it and the difference was real. Take it seriously.
Where you see "to taste", "until tender", or "about an hour", that's not laziness. It means the variable that decides it isn't a number, and I've told you what the variable is instead. Read that part.
And when a recipe gives you both, the number is the starting point and the description is the target. Pull the pork belly at 203°F, or when it probes tender. The second one wins.