About YummYum

I'd been hearing for a while that Claude Code was something very special. Now I needed a project to help me kick its tires. I'd had this idea for a recipe app rattling around for years. For me there were 3 key things a recipe app should solve

• Capture. Capture needs to be frictionless whether it comes from a website, a book, an article or an email
• Making it your own. Invariably when you have a recipe at some point you add your own touches and notes, this needs to be super easy and straightforward.
• Sharing. And once you have made all those changes someone is going to ask you for that recipe and then you want something clear and nice looking to give them, so you need a really smooth recipe editor.

Armed with that thinking and a couple of rough wireframes, I sat down with Claude to work out a technical strategy, and then we got to building. I was genuinly shocked at how smooth it went, you need to understand I'm not a programer, I'm decent with HTML/CSS and a tiny bit of javascript just enought to get me in trouble. But even that was not needed, basicaly every edit I have done is by describing to Claude what I wanted, even minor styling changes were solved quicker by letting Claude do them.

So what did we build

• Add recipe by URL or photo — paste a URL and it scrapes it, take a photo and it will extract the recipe from the photo, having done that Claude parses whatever you throw at it into a clean, consistent structure: ingredients grouped logically, steps numbered, metadata filled in and if imperial units convert those to metric.
• Personal annotations — click any step or ingredient to add a private note. Your adjustments live alongside the original, in your own handwriting (well, Caveat font, but you get the idea).
• Edit in place — the editor feels more like Word than a form. Outputs a clean formatted recipe that works well on mobile, desktop or paper.
• AI driven serves scaling and shopping list — use AI to recalculate ingredient quantities for any number of servings. Use AI to strip irrelevant information from the ingredients to generate the shopping list.
• Rudimentary social tools — keep things to yourself or share just with friends or share them with the world.

Who it's for

If you're here, you're probably a friend, or a friend of a friend. This won't become a commercial product — there is too much deontological gray area with copyright: although you can't copyright a recipe, you can copyright the text describing the steps. I just want to keep this alive as a working testbed to explore ideas and technology. I'm enjoying seeing where it goes, hope you will too.

Let me know what you think.

Carl