I wish you best of luck
Show HN: Meals You Love – AI-powered meal planning and grocery shopping
41–50 of 56 posts
Re: Show HN: Meals You Love – AI-powered meal planning and grocery shopping
#42this is surreal
it imagines that all food ingredients are generic and interchangable, that there is no significant seasonal variability in variety and quality the harshest part is that all of these schemes start out with a loss leader special arangement with supliers that sets people up with higher quality products at great prices, that are soon swaped out for whatever mass product at as high a price as the market will bear, the whole thing designed to create predictability for retailers and drive profits up. grossmart with delivery, and a chatbot foodporning in your ear. blech
Re: Show HN: Meals You Love – AI-powered meal planning and grocery shopping
#43Almost everything I eat is prepared from scratch by me at home. I cook mostly be feeling these days. I don't find rando recipes online that useful. They tend to take more time just because you're trying to work out what they're talking about only to find out after several precise instructions, oh, they're making a béchamel sauce, which I could make with my eyes closed.
What I've been working on for my own personal uses is a curated database that keeps track of ratings and numbers like perceived difficulty and actual time taken (these vary wildly from what they tell you). Then an algorithm that generates a plan based on given parameters for that week, mainly how much time you have and whether you want to try new things.
I also essentially rewrite all recipes in my own shorthand format which is based on how I think and execute the recipes in the kitchen. For example, I do mise en place for some things, but not others. I do chop all vegetables first, for example, but I don't pre-measure out all my spices because that's pointless.
Most off the shelf software has the wrong priorities for experienced cooks IMO. Like I don't need or care about the exact quantity required of tomatoes for the week. I just know this. I also don't need it to tell me I need e.g. turmeric. I cook mainly Indian food, I always have turmeric. I also haven't found one that understands meal prep or base ingredients that still need preparation (like cooked dal, dosa batter, masalas etc.)
My main problem is the analysis paralysis when deciding what to eat for the week. But using someone else's database for recipes is useless to me.
Re: Show HN: Meals You Love – AI-powered meal planning and grocery shopping
#44Cookbooks are already a thing. I am baffled that you think this is something we need AI for.
AI slop enjoyers want to delegate every single aspects of their lives to AI. For them cooking is an insult to their intellect, writing a personal message to someone is a waste of time, &c.
Why bother with cookbooks when you can cook the statistical average of spaghetti carbonara ?
Why bother spending 10 minutes of brain power when you can just pay 9.99 a month for a machine to tell you what to do ?
Re: Show HN: Meals You Love – AI-powered meal planning and grocery shopping
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd pay you for that. Take my money you SaaS!
Why? Just drop the pics into CHatGPT and say "make me a weight loss meal plan based on what I have in the fridge and the cupboards" You could make a website that does that in a couple of hours.
But then I need it to do the web order as well finding the correct products so things get delivered.
After that I need it to tell how to organize the bag into the fridge.. Ideally I'd have meta AI glasses or similar to that.
I can use ChatGPT once for doing all that, but then I need it all automated and a fluid experience.
My ADHD brain doesn't trigger dopamine for doing the same thing twice.
Re: Show HN: Meals You Love – AI-powered meal planning and grocery shopping
#46I photographed everything in my fridge and everything in my cupboards and uploaded it to an LLM and photographed by shopping receipts and asked it to create weight loss meal plans based on my existing shopping and food buying habits. Worked real nice. Did I make it into a business? Should everything be a SAAS? Nah.
What's a good LLM for this kind of task?
Re: Show HN: Meals You Love – AI-powered meal planning and grocery shopping
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sorry it’s a bit of a nitpick.
Not at all a nitpick, it is one of the things that is painful in the app IMO. I think the length of time for some of the operations is one of the bigger reasons for people to bounce after initial sign up. I need to think if there are some clever ways to improve the onboarding experience such as trying to pre-generate some recipes during/after the onboarding flow.
I think your sign up flow is just too long also, all that information might be necessary to get the app to function how you want but it feels more like filing your taxes. Maybe you could build an agent that the user talks to during sign up? And it will fill out the form in the background? Also you could definitely cache some high quality content (kind of like how TikTok has a core set of high quality videos it uses during new user onboarding)
Re: Show HN: Meals You Love – AI-powered meal planning and grocery shopping
#48I think I might have the wrong concept of meal planning. For me, it should be simple meals using fewer ingredients and most importantly reusing ingredients you already have. During the meal creation, I asked to keep it to 1 protein source, but it gave me recipes for 4 different protein types. I cannot possibly be buying salmon, chicken and 2 different cuts of meat each week. The other ingredients follow the same pattern.
Re: Show HN: Meals You Love – AI-powered meal planning and grocery shopping
#49I think I might have the wrong concept of meal planning. For me, it should be simple meals using fewer ingredients and most importantly reusing ingredients you already have. During the meal creation, I asked to keep it to 1 protein source, but it gave me recipes for 4 different protein types. I cannot possibly be buying salmon, chicken and 2 different cuts of meat each week. The other ingredients follow the same patt…
I'm sorry you hit that as it should definitely respect instructions around things like protein sources and ingredient selection. I'll take a look at that.
Re: Show HN: Meals You Love – AI-powered meal planning and grocery shopping
#50Cookbooks are already a thing. I am baffled that you think this is something we need AI for.
AI slop enjoyers want to delegate every single aspects of their lives to AI. For them cooking is an insult to their intellect, writing a personal message to someone is a waste of time, &c. Why bother with cookbooks when you can cook the statistical average of spaghetti carbonara ? Why bother spending 10 minutes of brain power when you can just pay 9.99 a month for a machine to tell you what to do ?
I get the skepticism as I shared similar thoughts on what recipe quality would be like. I'm also quite sensitive to AI slop. My wife, who really is an outstanding cook, was even more skeptical, and she has a _very_ high bar for recipes. To be clear, we don't use it to generate recipes for every meal. She has a collection of go-to favorites and then peppers in 1-2 AI recipes throughout the week, often to explore new things. She also uses it to create "Quick Bite" recipes for when we need something fast with whatever we have on hand, outside of an actual meal plan.
Honestly, I wasn't sure if the AI recipes were going to meet her standards when it comes to food, but so far she's been quite happy overall with the recipe quality. She often will request replacements or customizations, so the first pass suggestions are not always what she's looking for.
I realize it's definitely not for everyone though.