Comment by deng
2 days ago
> It now includes a fully interactive voice assistant so you don't need to get your dirty hands over your new iPad when you're cooking.
Always floored about the problems people think need fixing. The problem is not that you get your dirty hands on the iPad. The problem is that you want real recipes. You know, things people have actually cooked and found to be good. With real photos of how the result actually looks (instead of what an AI thinks it might look based on the description).
You might be lucky and find these for free someplace on the web. However, those LLMs that "vibecoded" this Rails app for you are now also used to flood the web with garbage recipes, so finding good recipes on the web will become much, much harder than it already is. I browsed through the recipes and could not find a single one that actually looks real, so at the moment, you are just adding to this problem. This is why people still buy physical cooking books. The good ones are made with sturdy, thick paper so that you can get your dirty hands on them. This is what cooking is all about. Only unused cooking books stay clean.
Vibe coders will be so busy solving the problem of making something work that they wont invest time into understanding the business problem at hand
My argument is: the problem is solved. The solution is called: books containing real recipes.
The "problem" people have is: yeah, I want those, but for free. But creating a cooking book is a ton of work and very expensive. You need to first find good, original recipes. Then you need to actually cook each of them to see if they are any good, at least once, sometimes several times to perfect the recipe. And unless you are a photographer as a side-hustle, you need to do this again and hire a professional to make good-looking photos of the result.
Printing the books is also expensive. Good cooking books need to have very good binding so that they can be flattened to show one page for a long time without disintegrating. The paper must be thick and the printing must be able to withstand stains and moisture without becoming unreadable.
I use a delivery service that packages the food and the recipe in a box. The recipe is 1 page long, on thick paper, and I have used it as temporary food storage when the cutting board gets too full.
Works like a champ. Pictures and everything.
Who cares if it solves a problem? Look how fast they made it! Bro it’s so easy! 20 minutes! Who needs to know how to code! Who needs skills? We just vibed it!!
Imo, this is not just a vibe coders problem. It's been a classic builders mindset issue, where many start with building and look to find problem to the solution.
To be fair the author of this did found two massively successful businesses so I imagine he does understand tackling a business problem.
Absolutely agree. Real recipes, tested by actual cooks (home or professional) with genuine photos, matter far more to me than avoiding messy screens. Does anyone know trustworthy sites that consistently offer recipes meeting these standards?
Seriouseats, Epicurious, Bonappetit, or anything with Kenji Lopez-Alt (for always going the distance in methodically and empirically testing all variations of whatever he is evaluating/developing).
If you want something in the short form video era, I do appreciate Andy Hearnden (andycooks) as he is both concise, consistent and always posts the full recipe in the video descriptions (all too rare).
+1 for Serious Eats. I also like NYT cooking. I do not like Bon Appetit, I find most of their recipes to not turn out well.
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https://www.bbcgoodfood.com/ -> Search recipes...
If you want just recipes that were published in the magazine (that this website is the companion to), you can also filter results to author = Good Food team
If you like Indian food I’d say Swasthi’s Recipes is decent. A lot of what I have seen on there is similar to how my aunties in Punjab n aunties of my friends in UP make food/have taught me to make food.
https://www.indianhealthyrecipes.com/
Edit, if you’re veg also this site is decent:
https://www.vegrecipesofindia.com/
Not books, but youtube / blog:
* Chef John (foodwishes)
* Brian Lagerstrom
* Adam Ragusea
* Sip N Feast
* Kenji Lopez-Alt
* Spain On A Fork
* Alton Brown (of course!)
I cook every day and love trying new things. There's no reason to pick just one, but if I had to, Chef John is my go-to. I stumbled across him when I was trying out pretty much every birria recipe on the internet, and his (yes, a white dude) is by far my favorite. That pattern seems to repeat with his recipes.
It's not free but Americas Test Kitchen is very, very good
For Italian cooking, il cucchiaio d'argento is like a reference website, unfortunately it's in italian only
Cucchiaio.it
https://www.pickuplimes.com/ is pretty good.
Does anyone know trustworthy sites that consistently offer recipes meeting these standards?
I believe you can subscribe to the New York Times Cooking section/app without subscribing to the rest of the New York Times.
I used to know people who hated the Times, but still paid for Cooking.
nytcooking is kinda the gold standard.
As somebody who cooks quite a lot (for a diverse set of people), I have the opposite experience of what you describe (also I hate having to touch my screen while cooking).
The cooking book scene has been openly criticized for not actually trying the recipes, even before LLMs were a thing[0]. Regular cooking websites have always been somewhat unusable due to massive ads and fluff text because 1) SEO and 2) recipes are not copyrightable, but the fluff text is.
For quite some time I get my recipes directly from chatgpt, the instructions are very condense, they work quite well, and most importantly: It knows how to substitute ingredients. "My friend is vegan and allergic to heat-resistant soy protein" and it's going to adjust accordingly.
[0]: https://www.matchingfoodandwine.com/news/blog/recipes-that-d...
What the hell is the "cooking book scene"? You make it sound like some cabal of cooking book writers sitting in some basement, conspiring to lead people astray. Nobody is saying that all cooking books are great, of course there are loads of shitty cooking books, and of course you are free to criticize that, even openly if you dare. I somehow cope by buying the good ones.
My experience with LLM recipes is like with pretty much everything else these things generate: usually very mediocre, mixed with glaring errors in between. If you are an experienced cook, you'll be able to manage since you'll recognize the errors.
In another comment, you say photos are required. I would claim that the cooking book scene is the publisher interest in the limited shelf space for photo-heavy cookbooks. Celebrity and TV chefs thoroughly represented.
Books without photos (McGee, Hewitt, Potter, Julia Child) are not interesting to publishers.
So you're allegedly annoyed with untested recipes and decided to solve this problem with a tool that only generates untested recipes? You're happier to cook or bake something from a wall of text that wasn't authored by anyone with any amount of culinary experience, that nobody has ever read before, attempted to replicate, or publicly critiqued, why?
I don't buy it, that's going to be a strictly worse experience than trying out the first search result that has photos, is rated 4/5 stars or better and that has a few positive comments. You can always ask an LLM for substitution recommendations separately.
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Yup. SEO slop is generally worse than AI generated, unfortunately
What do you think the AI was trained on?
Are you trying to tell me this Rubbery Lasagne isn't a real recipe?
https://www.recipeninja.ai/recipe/r_LZarKW1PMNlSlx/rubbery-l...
All Ingredients
- rubber cement, 2 cups
- water, 1 cup
- lasagne noodles, 1 box
- shredded mozzarella, 2 cups
...
Step 2
Prepare the rubber sauce by mixing 2 cups of rubber cement with 1 cup of water in a saucepan over low heat until thickened.
This is the funniest thing I've read in a while. Thanks.
Agreed! That was a problem even before LLMs showed up. I found my subscription to Cooks Illustrated/America's Test Kitchen to be incredibly valuable. Bonus: You don't have to read through 15 paragraphs of SEO fluff to get to the recipe.
Indeed. See Ann Reardon's recent video on the topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SVaYJgmPvCg
Is the project anything more than a (fairly elaborate I must recognize) 1 April joke? I agree with your point even on a more general level, amateur techies thinking to fix stuff which never needed fixing are nothing unusual. We "disrupt" the economy, the finances, housing and more, every day, while being barely legal and sometimes outright abusive to some part of the society, all in the name of the Saviour Technology. Is this just another example of "solutionism"? Or it's just me waking up grumpy and without coffee...
Edit: and right after this, I run into another AI-related gem: https://artificialintelligencemadesimple.substack.com/p/ai-t...
And without 14 paragraphs of how your great grandma first discovered this recipe on a trip to italy from a soldier she romanced
I'm convinced that people who complain about this don't use recipe sites very often. There are loads without any preamble, and many of those with narrative provide a 'jump to recipe' button. Even if it is a long article with no jump (rare), it's still not a big deal
1. Some people do want the narrative 2. It's not that much of a hardship to scroll
You're entirely right. I don't use recipe sites very often, and yet it still happens often enough that I have to keep scrolling and reading on different sites to get past the backstory
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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.
You don't fancy Cyanide Custard? Radioactive Slime Jello made with actual radioactive waste? Sweet Tooth Delight made with real human teeth? Or a few other desserts with NSFW names that would go down a treat for a family dinner. It is hard to please some people /s.
But yes, websites will now be filled with these low-quality recipes, and some might be outright dangerous. Cyanide custard should ring alarm bells, but using the wrong type of mushroom is equally dangerous and much more challenging to spot.
I don't know why everyone is so salty. It's like putting "vibecode" in the headline attracted the worst in people.
For context, I'm not a cooking geek or virtuoso. I enjoy it to some degree, but mostly it's just about having a nice, nutritious experience, in line with whatever my mood might be. I only ever measure things super accurately when I'm baking things in the bread maker (because it doesn't let you make corrections). For most meals, I wing half the measurements and time estimates.
In my experience, most "human recipes" are just random variations on some baseline. I hate looking for recipes on recipe sites, youtube, etc. There are food bloggers that are exceptions, but usually I'll just end up scrolling for a long time with just frustration to show for it. If I sort of know some of the ingredients I want to use, have some sense of the type of eating experience I'm going for, and I want a bunch of recommendations based on that, regular "human recipe" sites are not the answer.
90% of my new recipes come from ChatGPT, and that ratio is increasing. I just marinated some chicken based on a recipe it magicked for me. I asked for insights on mixing mayo and yoghurt in the same marinade, because I had leftovers of both. It gave me 5 or so diverse recipes, and I just picked the one that best fit my pantry and mood. I also asked it to convert the recipe from volume to weight, not to mention scale it for my specific quantity of chicken, which was super handy.
I find that ChatGPT is great at providing common sense instructions and approximations. It's absolutely awesome at clobbering together a meal from ingredients I tell it I have. I can have an actual dialogue about any of it, get all kinds of recommendations and insights. That's been very useful to me. I'd go as far as to say that recipe generation is one of the easiest real problems for an LLM to solve. Or, at least for the kinds of recipes I use.
I've done my share of recipes from Serious Eats, but they weren't particularly good. I was doing Breton galettes the other week, which are notoriously fiddly to get right. Serious Eats had a huge article about it, interesting insights, but their final recipe sucked, and I was trying to be accurate. Not only I failed to get the consistency right, the wheat-buckwheat ratio was nowhere near what you'd get in France. I say, write researched articles about what makes recipes work. I can read it, I can bounce my LLM off it. If it's a fiddly recipe, I'll have to fiddle with it no matter what. If I can have a conversation with an LLM about principles at work, that's much better to me than a bunch of "human recipes".
Also, I often have questions about alternatives or things I need advice on as I'm preparing food. I'll also look at the recipe a gazillion times to check the instructions, quantities, etc. I'll set and check a timer often too. A voice-assistant is the obvious answer to this, which I'll try at my earliest convenience.
Kudos to the author!
> In my experience, most "human recipes" are just random variations on some baseline.
This just shows your lack of experience and curiosity. The art of cooking is a cultural achievement with thousands of years of history, with vast differences between different countries and cultures. Just visit a store (yes, a real one) with a good cooking book section. You might be surprised.
Seriously, what's with this thread? I'd rather not have a discussion in this base tone.
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> It's absolutely awesome at clobbering together a meal from ingredients I tell it I have.
You should be able to do this yourself easily, though.