Comment by dmos62

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!