Well this is a good start, I tried searching for “Anti-inflammatory” and the app crashed. Likely that scaling is way out of proportion considering it’s here on HN , but do you have any load balancing or caching setup? Debouncing on the inputs?
I still haven't done the AI vibe coding, but I think I get a similar effect with the Conjure plugin for Neovim with Clojure.
Being able to type out and immediately execute it directly in the window, and even have your code replaced by the output, is kind of life-changing. It fundamentally changes the way you write code, like the REPL isn't just a quick way to test your code, but a direct helper to test the stuff that you right.
I did a project in Clojure recently, heavily using Conjure, and then my next project was in Rust. Rust has nice Neovim plugins as well, but it still kind of felt like a step backwards; I found myself reaching for the "automatically evaluate" keystrokes that don't exist on Rust.
Is the key feature here just the voice control? I’m wondering what you feel is missing from other popular recipe websites/trackers, and why I would choose to use this over something with more care put into it.
Or, was this mostly just an exercise in engineering/testing AI?
35 kLOC is quite a bit. I wonder how straightforward and maintainable this app ended up to be. This would require taking a look at the sources. While good Rails code tends to be very terse, frontend may be quite voluminous.
> I believe within a couple of months, when things like log tailing and automated testing and native version control get implemented
This sounds a bit too optimistic, especially around automated testing, but yes, eventually this all will be there.
> an extremely powerful tool for even non-technical people to write production-quality apps
But why would non-technical people would even think in terms of log tailing and version control, any more than they think about the gauge of wiring in their walls, or the kind of modulation their Wi-Fi device use? For really non-technical audience to make a good use of such tools, it won't just take the AI to be a competent coder. The AI should become a competent architect and a competent senior SWE to translate from the product management language to the software development language, without even surfacing it when not explicitly asked. It's going to be quite a bit of a challenge to make it work, and work about as reliably as with a human team.
Nice work! The voice control is actually really, really cool. I was able to say "show me a chicken tikka masala recipe" which got me 3 recipes, and then I said "show me the third one" and it opened nearly instantly. Pretty awesome. I want this for my entire computer!
I also wrote a recipe simplifying website, so this is a fun project to see. Incredible work!
Probably the main value engineers have for a maintenance project is context. I wonder what happens when we fully cede context to the machines…
Today, I got a request at work for a feature ("let's offer coupons!") that I thought would take a week. That was until I found out that another engineer wrote most of the code last year, and it'd take him a day to dust off.
I'm totally onboard with, and grateful for, larger-scale experiments like this…thanks for putting the effort in. I wonder how well Cursor (or similar) would handle a situation in which large amounts of code are _almost_ being used. What if 3k LOC accidentally get duplicated? Can our automated systems understand that and fix it? Because if they can't, a human is going to spend a _long_ time trying to figure out what happened.
Over the next 18 months, I expect we'll hear a few stories of the LLM accidentally reimplementing an entire feature in a separate code path. It's a whole new class of bugs! :D
I think the recipes on your site are AI-generated? If you're looking to generate a large number of recipes, I highly recommend my tool: https://github.com/Yiling-J/tablepilot. It's specifically designed for this kind of task. Don't forget to check out the examples folder, I use recipes as examples a lot.
Quick note: In my opinion, the ai-generated food pictures are deep in the uncanny valley. Unappetizingly so. The hollandaise sauce image is disturbing in a way that's hard to describe, which somehow makes it worse.
I have a paid subscription to Windsurf using Claude. I struggle to find much utility in terms of actually writing code. It spends a lot of time trying / retrying and glitching out. I'm sure in a couple of years it will be amazing (assuming a fundamental breakthrough isn't required) but it isn't quite there yet.
LLMs are super useful but currently, the primary use case is teaching, not doing. For this reason, I think ChatGPT is really just as good as an AI enabled editor (or both if you don't mind paying for two subscriptions).
Interesting… Thanks for putting in the effort. I'm curious, did your previous knowledge of programming help you accept code changes, or do you just keep everything written by agent?
Thanks for sharaing your journey, I have few observations
1. When I click on a recipe from home page it is maintaining the scroll position, so I am not seeing the top of the screen. Is this deliberate?
2. "Recipe Ninja was vibecoded by Tom in San Francisco." Will it increase of decrease trust in your system for users?
3. To remove AI changing random files, I use "Copy relative path" to tell AI which file to change (there is a keyboard shortcut too). Not fully vibe coding but can be useful for precision bug fixing.
I understand that this is just kind of a proof of concept exposition of AI capabilities, but I fucking hate it and it is emblematic of the kind of low effort drivel that is infecting the internet. This is totally unusable in every way possible. While technically impressive (that AI can make a pretty-ish and functional website) it is practically useless.
Also, the photos are some of the most un-appetizing, uncanny valley, shit I've ever seen.
"Still, I was determined not to write any code … I just sat laughing as the computer wrote code."
I can pop over to Midjourney and be determined not to draw a single line and "sit there laughing" as it draws the Mona Lisa in the style of Salvador Dali but with a turnip instead of a person.
How is this any different? What is ultimately notable about it? Did any of it make you a better programmer?
I'm always deeply impressed when people devote significant chunks of their time to achieving extraordinary results. I'm entirely baffled, however, that there's anything at all interesting about using an AI interface to build an AI interface to connect you to AI slop.
You could have spent 20 hours planting trees or doing some kind of community serivce, and the world would have been a far better place.
On a more serious note: I've found that for debugging difficult issues, o1 Pro is in a league of it's own.
Claude Code's eagerness to do work will often fix things given enough time, especially for self-contained pieces of software, but I still find myself going to o1 Pro more often than I'd expect.
A coworker and I did a comparison the other day, where we fired up o1 Pro and Claude Code with the same refactor. o1 Pro one-shotted it, while Claude Code took a few iterations.
Interestingly enough, the _thinking_ time of o1 Pro led us to just commit the Claude Code changes, as they were both finished in around the same time (1 min 37s vs. 2+ minutes), however we did end up using some feedback from o1 to fix an issue Claude hadn't caught. YMMV
Nice work! I also made a recipe app, but after seeing the recipes people generated on yours, I'm choosing not to share it at this time.
Seriously though – vibecoding is great. Even better (or only feasible) as engineers who can dive in when we need to.
My app is iOS and I had never done any Swift. I do have AI generation but that was more of a fun afterthought. The main utility is extracting recipes from the web and having a synced shopping list that I can share with my wife.
> It now includes a fully interactive voice assistant so you don't need to get your dirty hands over your new iPad when you're cooking.
Always floored about the problems people think need fixing. The problem is not that you get your dirty hands on the iPad. The problem is that you want real recipes. You know, things people have actually cooked and found to be good. With real photos of how the result actually looks (instead of what an AI thinks it might look based on the description).
You might be lucky and find these for free someplace on the web. However, those LLMs that "vibecoded" this Rails app for you are now also used to flood the web with garbage recipes, so finding good recipes on the web will become much, much harder than it already is. I browsed through the recipes and could not find a single one that actually looks real, so at the moment, you are just adding to this problem. This is why people still buy physical cooking books. The good ones are made with sturdy, thick paper so that you can get your dirty hands on them. This is what cooking is all about. Only unused cooking books stay clean.
Because the app shows entirely unfiltered "crowdsourced" latest recipes which of course are ridiculous given this is public, I first thought this was some high effort april fools joke on vibe coding, AI slop and the insecurity / thoughtlessness of the results.
But there is some quality in it, I can't argue against that
I assume the insane recipes are generated from users’ prompts, so you might want some content warning or moderation. Kinda cool though that it generates recipes for anything, regardless of if it involves food.
It does not seem very "viral" or income-generating. I know this is premature at this point, but without charging users for the service, is it reasonable to expect to make money off of this?
I don't think I would want to cook and eat AI generated recipes. I don't like to read AI generated texts and I don't like to listen to AI generated music.
You can call me a snob, but I appreciate some things only if they are the result of work and creativity of humans.
While I'm not going to make any food according to the recipes yet, the recipes gave me good chuckle. I'm always amazed by the creativity people have, a feeling that dissipates the moment I know something is AI generated. Comprehensive JavaScript Tutorial https://www.recipeninja.ai/recipe/r_VDcP5QiJjAPVhV/comprehen… is my favourite so far.
> using OpenAI's realtime API for voice-to-voice responses
Does it mean it use this expensive open ai audio model in the app? Don't you worry this will make it bankrupt if app goes viral and not monetised?
Can you share what's your strategy here, like topup $2000 open ai account as kind of marketing expenses for users to try for free? Genuine questions since planning to use openai audio API in other case and this kind of expensive price worry me a lot even if switching to new mini-transcribe and mini-tts
> The app’s security is not perfect, but I’m pretty happy with it for the scale I’m at. If I continue to grow and get more abuse, I’ll implement more robust measures.
I mean I guess kudos to you for being creative and building something, even if its with the so-called vibe-coding. But LoC is not the metric I would use to describe any app I've built, or that I am building.
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61 Comments
ada1981
This is great. Want to come demo it in the weekly EarthPilot.ai AI Playground tomorrow at 11est?
Http://earthpilot.com/play and then join at AnthonyDavidAdams.com/zoom at 11 for show and tell.
I’m making a non-fiction book writing agent and I’d love to better understand how you used function calling to navigate the website!
s2th4d
Well this is a good start, I tried searching for “Anti-inflammatory” and the app crashed. Likely that scaling is way out of proportion considering it’s here on HN , but do you have any load balancing or caching setup? Debouncing on the inputs?
black_13
[flagged]
Retr0id
I type "lasagne", hit enter, some things pop up and disappear before I can read them, and then I get a solid white screen. (in Firefox)
tombert
I still haven't done the AI vibe coding, but I think I get a similar effect with the Conjure plugin for Neovim with Clojure.
Being able to type out and immediately execute it directly in the window, and even have your code replaced by the output, is kind of life-changing. It fundamentally changes the way you write code, like the REPL isn't just a quick way to test your code, but a direct helper to test the stuff that you right.
I did a project in Clojure recently, heavily using Conjure, and then my next project was in Rust. Rust has nice Neovim plugins as well, but it still kind of felt like a step backwards; I found myself reaching for the "automatically evaluate" keystrokes that don't exist on Rust.
rsaz
Is the key feature here just the voice control? I’m wondering what you feel is missing from other popular recipe websites/trackers, and why I would choose to use this over something with more care put into it.
Or, was this mostly just an exercise in engineering/testing AI?
geitir
Would love to see a git repo
tomblomfield
I'm scaling the heroku database right now, which caused a little bit of downtime :-/
nine_k
Impressive!
35 kLOC is quite a bit. I wonder how straightforward and maintainable this app ended up to be. This would require taking a look at the sources. While good Rails code tends to be very terse, frontend may be quite voluminous.
> I believe within a couple of months, when things like log tailing and automated testing and native version control get implemented
This sounds a bit too optimistic, especially around automated testing, but yes, eventually this all will be there.
> an extremely powerful tool for even non-technical people to write production-quality apps
But why would non-technical people would even think in terms of log tailing and version control, any more than they think about the gauge of wiring in their walls, or the kind of modulation their Wi-Fi device use? For really non-technical audience to make a good use of such tools, it won't just take the AI to be a competent coder. The AI should become a competent architect and a competent senior SWE to translate from the product management language to the software development language, without even surfacing it when not explicitly asked. It's going to be quite a bit of a challenge to make it work, and work about as reliably as with a human team.
anonzzzies
That is nice actually. Recipe sites are so annoying where I have to scroll for an hour to see the ingredients. Thanks!
jorisnoo
I love how the top recipe shows a literal stuffed lamb, e.g. a plush toy. Lots of the generated images have an early deep dream vibe
peterldowns
Nice work! The voice control is actually really, really cool. I was able to say "show me a chicken tikka masala recipe" which got me 3 recipes, and then I said "show me the third one" and it opened nearly instantly. Pretty awesome. I want this for my entire computer!
ttd
Is this a serious thing? If so, I'd like to know where I can purchase the wasp meat required to make this recipe: https://www.recipeninja.ai/recipe/r_NYrbOKZEyqrp7r/wasp-meat…
iambateman
I also wrote a recipe simplifying website, so this is a fun project to see. Incredible work!
Probably the main value engineers have for a maintenance project is context. I wonder what happens when we fully cede context to the machines…
Today, I got a request at work for a feature ("let's offer coupons!") that I thought would take a week. That was until I found out that another engineer wrote most of the code last year, and it'd take him a day to dust off.
I'm totally onboard with, and grateful for, larger-scale experiments like this…thanks for putting the effort in. I wonder how well Cursor (or similar) would handle a situation in which large amounts of code are _almost_ being used. What if 3k LOC accidentally get duplicated? Can our automated systems understand that and fix it? Because if they can't, a human is going to spend a _long_ time trying to figure out what happened.
Over the next 18 months, I expect we'll hear a few stories of the LLM accidentally reimplementing an entire feature in a separate code path. It's a whole new class of bugs! :D
nwroot
I can tell. Ingredients. 1 skillet.
personjerry
https://www.recipeninja.ai/recipe/r_WHeXRD7qXHV0Vr/cyanide-i…
Ah yes, they just don't make cyanide ice cream like grandma used to
Yiling-J
I think the recipes on your site are AI-generated? If you're looking to generate a large number of recipes, I highly recommend my tool: https://github.com/Yiling-J/tablepilot. It's specifically designed for this kind of task. Don't forget to check out the examples folder, I use recipes as examples a lot.
russellbeattie
Quick note: In my opinion, the ai-generated food pictures are deep in the uncanny valley. Unappetizingly so. The hollandaise sauce image is disturbing in a way that's hard to describe, which somehow makes it worse.
DidYaWipe
What is "vibecoded" supposed to mean?
dbbljack
the microphone symbol should be animated while listening.
brcmthrowaway
How does one learn to vibe code
prawn
Ah yes, exactly as Ottolenghi would've presented it! https://www.recipeninja.ai/recipe/r_h7nU7K03fLU1W7/ottolengh…
osigurdson
I have a paid subscription to Windsurf using Claude. I struggle to find much utility in terms of actually writing code. It spends a lot of time trying / retrying and glitching out. I'm sure in a couple of years it will be amazing (assuming a fundamental breakthrough isn't required) but it isn't quite there yet.
LLMs are super useful but currently, the primary use case is teaching, not doing. For this reason, I think ChatGPT is really just as good as an AI enabled editor (or both if you don't mind paying for two subscriptions).
foragerdev
took forever to open.
kunalchuadhari
Interesting… Thanks for putting in the effort. I'm curious, did your previous knowledge of programming help you accept code changes, or do you just keep everything written by agent?
admiralrohan
Thanks for sharaing your journey, I have few observations
1. When I click on a recipe from home page it is maintaining the scroll position, so I am not seeing the top of the screen. Is this deliberate?
2. "Recipe Ninja was vibecoded by Tom in San Francisco." Will it increase of decrease trust in your system for users?
3. To remove AI changing random files, I use "Copy relative path" to tell AI which file to change (there is a keyboard shortcut too). Not fully vibe coding but can be useful for precision bug fixing.
Good luck with the project.
DontchaKnowit
I understand that this is just kind of a proof of concept exposition of AI capabilities, but I fucking hate it and it is emblematic of the kind of low effort drivel that is infecting the internet. This is totally unusable in every way possible. While technically impressive (that AI can make a pretty-ish and functional website) it is practically useless.
Also, the photos are some of the most un-appetizing, uncanny valley, shit I've ever seen.
johntitorjr
[dead]
Tainnor
Thank you for that ice water recipe, really wouldn't have known how to do that: https://www.recipeninja.ai/recipe/r_8Pq0RPfvVGf2Xw/ice-water…
low_tech_love
Amazing! Truly the frontier of technology. Now imagine if every recipe was an NFT, stored in the blockchain!!
dmos62
Ok, I think this is actually the best recipe app I've used. Well done!
MrVandemar
"Still, I was determined not to write any code … I just sat laughing as the computer wrote code."
I can pop over to Midjourney and be determined not to draw a single line and "sit there laughing" as it draws the Mona Lisa in the style of Salvador Dali but with a turnip instead of a person.
How is this any different? What is ultimately notable about it? Did any of it make you a better programmer?
I'm always deeply impressed when people devote significant chunks of their time to achieving extraordinary results. I'm entirely baffled, however, that there's anything at all interesting about using an AI interface to build an AI interface to connect you to AI slop.
You could have spent 20 hours planting trees or doing some kind of community serivce, and the world would have been a far better place.
tajulislam22
This is so crazy. How did you gather recepies
jumploops
Glad you finally found Claude Code useful, Tom ;)
On a more serious note: I've found that for debugging difficult issues, o1 Pro is in a league of it's own.
Claude Code's eagerness to do work will often fix things given enough time, especially for self-contained pieces of software, but I still find myself going to o1 Pro more often than I'd expect.
A coworker and I did a comparison the other day, where we fired up o1 Pro and Claude Code with the same refactor. o1 Pro one-shotted it, while Claude Code took a few iterations.
Interestingly enough, the _thinking_ time of o1 Pro led us to just commit the Claude Code changes, as they were both finished in around the same time (1 min 37s vs. 2+ minutes), however we did end up using some feedback from o1 to fix an issue Claude hadn't caught. YMMV
apgwoz
Help! I just made the Diarrhea Walnuts (https://www.recipeninja.ai/recipe/r_N1VSPtXzCJVV3l/diarrhea-…) recipe and it turns out I am allergic to Walnuts! I am throwing up everywhere! You’re gonna be hearing from my lawyers!
ilaksh
People are putting disgusting nonsense in there. Maybe add an AI review step to block that stuff. Let them do the whole recipe, then just block it.
a012
Opened and the first recipe was “Thick white cum soup”, glad I’m my mobile phone, not at work
lwansbrough
Every recipe is cum bro
groggo
Nice work! I also made a recipe app, but after seeing the recipes people generated on yours, I'm choosing not to share it at this time.
Seriously though – vibecoding is great. Even better (or only feasible) as engineers who can dive in when we need to.
My app is iOS and I had never done any Swift. I do have AI generation but that was more of a fun afterthought. The main utility is extracting recipes from the web and having a synced shopping list that I can share with my wife.
deng
> It now includes a fully interactive voice assistant so you don't need to get your dirty hands over your new iPad when you're cooking.
Always floored about the problems people think need fixing. The problem is not that you get your dirty hands on the iPad. The problem is that you want real recipes. You know, things people have actually cooked and found to be good. With real photos of how the result actually looks (instead of what an AI thinks it might look based on the description).
You might be lucky and find these for free someplace on the web. However, those LLMs that "vibecoded" this Rails app for you are now also used to flood the web with garbage recipes, so finding good recipes on the web will become much, much harder than it already is. I browsed through the recipes and could not find a single one that actually looks real, so at the moment, you are just adding to this problem. This is why people still buy physical cooking books. The good ones are made with sturdy, thick paper so that you can get your dirty hands on them. This is what cooking is all about. Only unused cooking books stay clean.
maxlin
Because the app shows entirely unfiltered "crowdsourced" latest recipes which of course are ridiculous given this is public, I first thought this was some high effort april fools joke on vibe coding, AI slop and the insecurity / thoughtlessness of the results.
But there is some quality in it, I can't argue against that
jl6
I assume the insane recipes are generated from users’ prompts, so you might want some content warning or moderation. Kinda cool though that it generates recipes for anything, regardless of if it involves food.
blitzar
I have a few qualms with this app:
It does not seem very "viral" or income-generating. I know this is premature at this point, but without charging users for the service, is it reasonable to expect to make money off of this?
DeathArrow
I don't think I would want to cook and eat AI generated recipes. I don't like to read AI generated texts and I don't like to listen to AI generated music.
You can call me a snob, but I appreciate some things only if they are the result of work and creativity of humans.
rmnclmnt
It feels like Jian Yang and Big Head are making a new app
bilekas
Yeah, this is amusing but I would like to see the source that was “vibes” 34k LOC is an outrageous number for something so basic..
floppiplopp
Is this satire making fun of 'AI'? I cannot tell. But it looks and feels like satire.
vander_elst
I think this needs a NSFW added to the title, on the first page at the moment there are at least 50% of NSFW recipes.
wazoox
Obviously your fish recipes are the best, well done sir :) Apparently most people aren't aware of the date…
a_c
While I'm not going to make any food according to the recipes yet, the recipes gave me good chuckle. I'm always amazed by the creativity people have, a feeling that dissipates the moment I know something is AI generated. Comprehensive JavaScript Tutorial https://www.recipeninja.ai/recipe/r_VDcP5QiJjAPVhV/comprehen… is my favourite so far.
amanzi
This timeline is so cursed I can't tell if this is real or just an April Fools joke.
agluszak
Ai slop for generating more ai slop!
pzo
> using OpenAI's realtime API for voice-to-voice responses
Does it mean it use this expensive open ai audio model in the app? Don't you worry this will make it bankrupt if app goes viral and not monetised?
Can you share what's your strategy here, like topup $2000 open ai account as kind of marketing expenses for users to try for free? Genuine questions since planning to use openai audio API in other case and this kind of expensive price worry me a lot even if switching to new mini-transcribe and mini-tts
GaryNumanVevo
> The app’s security is not perfect, but I’m pretty happy with it for the scale I’m at. If I continue to grow and get more abuse, I’ll implement more robust measures.
The app literally exposes his OpenAI key.
hansmayer
I mean I guess kudos to you for being creative and building something, even if its with the so-called vibe-coding. But LoC is not the metric I would use to describe any app I've built, or that I am building.
johnisgood
Please append NSFW to the title, it is quite NSFW. I am sure it is a feature, and not a bug though.
HPsquared
Missed an opportunity to call it "Vibe Cooking"
4ndrewl
Couldn't you just have installed wordpress and a theme?
notachatbot123
Stop ruining the commons please, it is a horrible ethical crime to flood the internet with AI-generated garbage.
Xophmeister
April fools day has messed with my ability to identify satire at this time of year. Let's look at the evidence:
Posting date: 2025-04-02T01:57:13 1743559033 <– too late
LoC: 35,000 <– That's a _lot_
Front page: "Elon Musk Dirty Pants", "Heroin Hashbrowns", "AI Slop Stew", "Sweet Tooth Delight Made with Human Teeth" <– WTF?
This is a joke, right?
Quarondeau
"White Power Waffles"? You may want to double-check your examples.
https://www.recipeninja.ai/recipe/r_0a8wYxMgm1zFSw/white-pow…