It started as a fun experiment to check how quickly I will be able to deploy something robust without any prior experience or 3-5 years senior level knowledge of a new for me tech stack but with the substantial help of AI coding tools. So as I am a solo-team developer I took for the job PaaS services and easy-to-go web development tools like Vercel+NodeJS [TypeScript], Supabase, Stripe and for AI co-piloting at first Cursor and after a month - Claude code.
The product has wide range of features:
Calendar for planning and assigning meals, recipes library, AI recipes extractor from TikTok videos and from plain text instructions, recipes editing of ingredients instructions calories etc., invitation logic for adding collaborators into your calendar dashboard to share recipes and split days of cooking, automatically generated grocery list for purchasing easily required ingredients.
The tool is fun to use and we are using it with my wife as first beta testers the last couple of months.
It took me about 50 days by 1-4 hours a day of work that is around I would say 130-ish hours with 9-to-5 job and spending sometimes half, sometimes all weekends for resting.
I could deploy much earlier but I decided to make proper e2e tests, by taking user's security seriously applied RLS policies and carefully considered backend apis to avoid any potential data leaks. Also foreign tables and supabase wrappers were a completely new concept for me so it took me some time to figure out how to properly configure everything.
I used a proper dev environment and blocked tools access to production for co-pilot as it wanted to reset at any new migration my database . Also I took under control AI and most of the time planning session lasted 5-10 iterations until we understood each other clearly, so maybe 80% was planning and probably only 20% for coding if not less. My coding contributions were minimum - I wrote maybe 5% of the code. Database functions, security definers, RLSs were hard to grasp by AI in the context of my app user stories so I did it by 80-90% myself and asked Claude to finish it under my control.
P.S. Frankly speaking I of course did a lot of "toys" before with plain Javascript, Angular and HTMX. MySQL is kinda similar at some degree with PostgreSQL so its not like I had 0 experience at all. Also I don't know but I feel like the biggest asset even not a prior experience with some tools but knowledge of overall software development patterns, what each task requires and how to avoid messy situations, keep things simple but robust at the same time.
The tool uses scientific methods to monitor dietary intakes. It utilises unbiased, moderated food databases such as Open Food Facts and Food Data Central. I extract ingredients using AI and map them to FDC database foundational foods. Gives users a lot of control over which ingredients where used and in their sizes. Practically it is like recipe ingredients parsing from a text but with editing tooling.
It started as a fun experiment to check how quickly I will be able to deploy something robust without any prior experience or 3-5 years senior level knowledge of a new for me tech stack but with the substantial help of AI coding tools. So as I am a solo-team developer I took for the job PaaS services and easy-to-go web development tools like Vercel+NodeJS [TypeScript], Supabase, Stripe and for AI co-piloting at first Cursor and after a month - Claude code.
The product has wide range of features: Calendar for planning and assigning meals, recipes library, AI recipes extractor from TikTok videos and from plain text instructions, recipes editing of ingredients instructions calories etc., invitation logic for adding collaborators into your calendar dashboard to share recipes and split days of cooking, automatically generated grocery list for purchasing easily required ingredients.
The tool is fun to use and we are using it with my wife as first beta testers the last couple of months.
It took me about 50 days by 1-4 hours a day of work that is around I would say 130-ish hours with 9-to-5 job and spending sometimes half, sometimes all weekends for resting.
I could deploy much earlier but I decided to make proper e2e tests, by taking user's security seriously applied RLS policies and carefully considered backend apis to avoid any potential data leaks. Also foreign tables and supabase wrappers were a completely new concept for me so it took me some time to figure out how to properly configure everything.
I used a proper dev environment and blocked tools access to production for co-pilot as it wanted to reset at any new migration my database . Also I took under control AI and most of the time planning session lasted 5-10 iterations until we understood each other clearly, so maybe 80% was planning and probably only 20% for coding if not less. My coding contributions were minimum - I wrote maybe 5% of the code. Database functions, security definers, RLSs were hard to grasp by AI in the context of my app user stories so I did it by 80-90% myself and asked Claude to finish it under my control.
P.S. Frankly speaking I of course did a lot of "toys" before with plain Javascript, Angular and HTMX. MySQL is kinda similar at some degree with PostgreSQL so its not like I had 0 experience at all. Also I don't know but I feel like the biggest asset even not a prior experience with some tools but knowledge of overall software development patterns, what each task requires and how to avoid messy situations, keep things simple but robust at the same time.