Show HN: I vibecoded a 35k LoC recipe app

I've got a shelf full of physical cookbooks -- The New Best Recipe, The Food Lab, an Ottolenghi book, On Food and Cooking, etc. I like them, I've read through all of them, I sometimes use them for inspiration.

It's rare that I actually cook directly from them -- usually, that'd be big and fancy stuff or stuff I'm very unfamiliar with; in both cases I usually take the time to cross reference whatever the cookbook says with additional resources from the internet.

ChatGPT, on the other hand, I frequently use when or before cooking (and I cook virtually every day).

It's great when I only have a vague idea based on stuff in the fridge; five minutes later I've got a checklist I can reference. If it hallucinates something that I flat out don't think will work or, much more likely, comes up with something that I don't want or cannot do for lack of ingredients or time or whatever, I'll tell it to adjust the recipe and it does.

It's also great when I feed it a couple of existing recipes (from real people) to compare and contrast and integrate and reformat in a way that's most useful to me, e.g. a tabular format, or scaled to a different serving size.

With all that said, the AI based recipe sites don't really do it for me, either. If I want to cook purely AI generated recipes, a chat interface works fine -- and probably better. What I really want is an AI tool that helps me curate my own recipe collection. E.g. I want to ask it "I'd like to make Ramen, how did I do it the last time, what were my notes" and when it's done I want to tell it "ok, this was fine, I decided to double the mirin and next time I'd marinate the eggs longer" and have it update the recipe.

It has some basic features that are 'in-house' like a login, everything else seems to be using third party API's. As per the longer article :

> Eleven Labs API for text-to-speech conversion

> streamio-ffmpeg gem for audio file analysis

> Active Storage integration for audio file management

> OpenAI integration for recipe generation

etc. I'm not saying it's not a fun excersize in 'vibe coding', I'm just very curios the quality of the code that was actually produced. Its my feeling project maintainability is something that will be a big pain point in the future is people are relying on these tools.. 35k LOC for this recipe app smells like that to me at least.

please stop saying vibecoding it makes me wanna kms

A cooking web app 35k LoC? Wow, the author might be surprised to know that an entire OS kernel can be programmed at a fraction of that count. I can safely say that the days where we compained about JS bloat can be put aside, this is a whole new league by itself.

Sane advice: learn to program, put the AI hype/drug aside and do yourself a favor. It's an invaluable lifetime skill knowing to program from scratch and perhaps unassisted coding will be a looked-after skill in the years to come.

Full Disclosure: I'm building a LLM chat app for software developers and domain experts

> I struggle to find much utility in terms of actually writing code.

I personally feel you need to give up some control and just let the LLM do its thing if you want to use it to help you build. It honestly does a lot of things in a more verbose way and I've come to the conclusion that it is an LLM writing code for another LLM. As long as I can debug it, I'm okay with the code, as I can develop at a pace that is truly unreal.

I finished my "Recent" contexts feature in a half a day, today. Without the LLM, this would have taken me a week I think. I would say 98% of my code in the past few months has been AI generated. You can see a real life work flow here:

https://app.gitsense.com/?chat=eece40e2-6064-46d2-9bf1-d868c...

I truly believe if you provide a LLM with the right context, it can meet your functional specs 90% of the time. Note the emphasis on functional and not necessary style. And if *YOU* architecture your code properly, it should be 100% maintainable.

I do want to make it clear that what I am doing right now is not novel, but I believe most problems are not. If the problem is not well understood, it can be a challenge like my my chat bridge feature. This feature allows you import Git repos for chatting but I will probably need to rewrite 50% of the LLM code since the solution it built is not scalable.