Built a cooking/recipe app I actually use daily

Repo: https://github.com/shurt003/night-kitchen (MIT) I'd open the fridge, see chicken breast and a vegetable, and make the same boring meal again. I have a pantry full of spices, rice, ramen and sauces, but I never used them because I couldn't remember everything I had. What it does • Staples + "Wing it": I keep a list of what I always have on hand. I type in what I'm looking at ("chicken breast, broccoli") and Claude pitches 3 dinners that use my staples, and I can ask for more. The recipes follow cooking principles inspired by The Food Lab and Salt Fat Acid Heat (written in my own words in the prompt, not copied from the books): season in stages, balance acid, get real browning, cook to temperature cues instead of "until done." • Capture from anywhere: I share a URL, screenshots, a PDF or text from the iOS share sheet, and the recipe shows up as a tile in my library. A lot of sites (Serious Eats, my favorite) block server-side fetches, so an iOS Shortcut sends screenshots instead. It also works for photos of cookbooks and magazines. • Ask about any recipe: what goes with it, meal prep ideas, substitutions. Useful answers can be saved as notes on the recipe. • Plus a week planner, an offline grocery list that merges duplicates and remembers aisles, cook mode with timers, and a JSON export. How Claude built it I'm a UX designer with some coding knowledge, not a developer. I built this over about 6 weeks with Claude Code (157 commits). What worked for me: • Spec first, code second. I wrote a full spec before any code, and had Claude write a design doc (DESIGN.md, in the repo) for the look and motion before building the UI. • Phased plans with gates. For bigger features, Claude wrote a plan doc first. The real ones are in the docs folder, e.g. the meal-prep and multi-user plans. Each phase had a gate: Claude verifies locally and in a browser preview, deploys, then I run a checklist on my phone before the next phase starts. • Letting it catch its own mistakes. When a bug slipped through (a splash screen that only broke after navigating), the fix went into the plan as a rule: "after testing a feature, keep using the app and move between tabs." • Adding friends later. Claude added multi-user support later (each person gets their own private library) in phases, with a two-account test before real friends were added. How Claude runs inside the app • Claude Haiku 4.5 extracts recipes, tags them, sorts grocery items into aisles, and flags duplicates. Screenshots go to Claude as one message with all images in order, so overlapping scroll captures merge into one recipe. • Claude Sonnet handles "Wing it," week planning, and the Ask chat. • Voyage AI embeddings power semantic search ("that soup with the coconut milk"). Anthropic doesn't have an embeddings API. • Stack: Next.js, Supabase (Postgres + pgvector), Vercel, installed as a PWA on iOS. It's self-hosted: you bring your own Anthropic key (plus optional Voyage and Supabase projects), and the README walks through setup. My API cost runs less than $2 a month. Happy to answer questions about the build process or the prompts.