Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (Nov 2025)

It is a recipe app but better, and way more technically capable than anything out there. The goal is to make the best recipe app ever made. With bulletproof easy to follow recipes and smart features to make cooking simple. Everyone deserves good food at home, but good food is complicated and time consuming. An experienced cook can make good food quickly, cheaply and make it look easy. The idea is that Kastanj will have the knowledge you don’t so you can cook like a pro without having to spend years learning everything.

Backstory: I have a note where I write down practical problems I experience in life. I noticed over time that the amount of notes related to food and cooking was growing faster than anything else. I then began searching for a solution. I tried over 50 recipe apps, always the premium version if possible. There are some good apps out there but even the best ones only solved something like 50% of my issues. After enough frustration and search I just decided to start working on my own app. That was 4 years ago... It turns out that solving some of these problems where technically complicated to do, so now I understand why no other app could solve my problems. None the less, after 4 years of work, starting over from scratch 5 times, I have now landed on a solution that technically solves all my problems.

Going forward: Now I am working on filling the app with data and make it easy to use for normal humans. I am on purpose limiting myself to only perfecting the core functionality of what a recipe should be. I intend to launch sometime in 2026. The UI will be small and limited at first, but it is perfect for my needs. Therefore I hope it will also be perfect for someone else. Over time I will enable more advanced functionality and build it out based on user feedback. I know the backend can support 100% of my needs, but I don’t want to make it bloated. Therefore the UI is on purpose focused on only the most important things and then we will build it out with time, together with the recipe creators and end users.

Lately I've mainly been working on stability and bug fixes. I've released some big features the past few months so I'm doing a big push on polish, before I again tackle some larger features that I'd like to implement.

If CLI scripts is something you're interested in at all, give it a go! We have docs and a guide [1] for getting started, feedback very welcome :)

[0] https://github.com/amterp/rad [1] https://amterp.github.io/rad/guide/getting-started/

https://sheetstopdf.com/

Once you sign up and connect your Google sheet, it generates a template (using AI) based on your data, which you can edit in a Notion-like editor. You can then generate PDFs for your entire sheet or a for a range of rows.

Some use cases I'm seeing:

* Certificates for students or course completions

* Monthly invoices for all your clients (https://sheetstopdf.com/use-cases/business/invoices)

* Personalized reports with individual client data

* Event tickets or conference badges

* Contracts, offer letters, or any personalized documents

* Really anything where you have rows of data that need to become individual PDFs

Would love to hear what you think or if you have use cases I haven't thought of yet!