From Scratch
I've always enjoyed food and cooking. I love adding to my cookbook collection and I consider browsing NYT Cooking for a fun new dinner to be a leisure activity. I used to go to the grocery store every few days, but I really felt like I advanced to the next level of adulthood when I committed to the omnibus weekly grocery shop a few years ago. The only flaws with my "one big trip" strategy were that I routinely ended up spending at least half an hour looking up all of the recipes I wanted to make and cross-comparing the ingredient lists with what I had in the pantry to compose the actual list of what I was shopping for… and then I was also maintaining a separate list of all the recipes I had bought ingredients for & where they came from so I could keep track of what I had ready & could actually find the instructions when it was time to make a meal.
With all due respect to the team at NYT Cooking, the "shop ingredients" button that deeplinks to Instacart is my personal enemy
It was clear to me that software was the solution. I could see the exact screens of the app I needed in my mind's eye. The real question was how to convince a developer to build me this niche one-off thing that I have no interest in turning into a real business. Thankfully, I am married to a software developer who was excited to do some vibe coding, so that worked out well!
The First Attempt 🤖
Given that this project was purely for my own personal use and I wasn't sure how good the AI tools would be at making UI, I did an extremely light pass on a few of key screens in Figma & let the vibe coding begin. After not that many hours of answering occasional questions about how things should work and letting Claude Code and Cursor do their thing, we had an app! And then I immediately had to figure out how to get on GitHub so I could file tickets about the 1 million obvious problems that a thoughtful human developer would never have shipped. The agents were eventually able to make most things work properly, although I've been told that the codebase they made is best described as "spaghetti." My parents and I have now been successfully using our somewhat ugly and only mildly broken app for a few months, and they recently told me they don't mind that much when it crashes because it's so useful overall ‼️
In case anyone thought I was kidding about my parents testing for me
Overall, my biggest takeaway from this project from a design perspective is that coding agents do not have any aesthetic taste. Therefore, unlike the wonderful & talented human software devs I've had the pleasure of working with, you cannot trust it to fill in any blanks itself unless you're OK with the thing it makes being ugly.
Phase 2 Coming Soon ⏰
Now that I've been living in the app for a while, I've gotten a much better sense of what additional features I want, and I've also psyched myself up to go do a much more detailed pass on the app design to clean up any of the ugly screens that the agents made last round. Once this round of cleanup is done, we might put it in the App Store because my mom wants to share it with her friends and it's really annoying to add people via TestFlight.
