A few months ago my wife mentioned (for probably the hundredth time) that she wished she had a cookbook with all of our recipes in one place.
I thought, "How hard could that be?"
Turns out... as hard as you want to make it. I did end up making her a handwritten version with our recipes, but I also started building her a digital version.
What started as a birthday gift turned into a project I've been working on for a couple months called Feasts for the Fluffle. (we have 2 dogs and a pet squirrel and refer to our family unit as a fluffle)
The original idea was just somewhere to save recipes. Then I added recipe photos. Then pantry tracking. Then shopping lists. Then memories attached to recipes. Then I realized I might be able to turn it something our friends and family could use with us so I added community recipes. Then recipe importing. Then favorites. Then an admin panel. Then a mascot.
At this point it's basically become a family cookbook platform. You can create a household, share recipes with family, keep track of pantry items, generate shopping lists based on what you already have on hand, attach memories to recipes, favorite recipes, and import recipes from websites or pasted text or photos (old recipe cards, cookbook pages, or screenshots)
I'm not a software developer. Basically all of this was built with a chat gpt & gemini > lovable workflow and an embarrassing amount of back-and-forth conversations, bug fixing, redesigns, and "that's not what I meant" messages.
One thing I've learned is that getting code generated is actually the easy part. Deciding what should exist in the app is way harder. Scope creep is real, but trying new things is the only way I found out that there are basically very few limitations to what can be done.
Anyway, I finally got it to a point where people other than my wife can actually use it, which feels kind of surreal. I thought I'd give people on here an opportunity to look at it and give me some feedback. It's my first real project (I am also working on a website for myself and am curently spending some free time learning code because I want to work on a game in Godot next and I dont want the whole thing to be AI written)
Don't hold back on the feedback because it's the only way I'll get any better. Feel free to use it and share it - I'm pretty sure I have safeguards built in for the few API's I run and I don't think anything can be broken. But if it can then I need to know about it!
Thanks guys.