Sure, I’ll try to be as transparent as I can. In my experience as a software developer, over the years there’s been a lot of reinventing the wheel. Things like dialogs, menus, panels, lists, drawers opening and closing, etc. are pretty standard stuff. I use Vuetify for the basic Material Design components and Tailwind for styling, and sometimes getting the two to play nicely together means overriding Vuetify’s CSS, which can be pretty tedious. That’s the kind of thing I’m happy to let AI handle.

Another example, I recently added bulk deletion to the library. The whole flow around selecting multiple items, showing checkboxes, having a “select all” option, keeping track of what’s selected, etc. is such a common pattern that AI can put most of that together very quickly. For stuff like that, I don’t really see a difference in quality whether I write all of that myself or have AI help with it.

I write a lot of the text in the app myself, but I can be a bit too verbose, so AI helps me shorten and tidy it. The translations were done with AI and mostly checked by me, and the Greek one was also checked by my friend’s mother. I would like to add more European languages, but at the moment I don’t have a good way to verify them properly.

For things where the actual behavior matters more, like making sure users can only access what they’re supposed to, or that every ingredient ends up in a valid recipe step and nothing gets lost, I sometimes start by having AI write the tests. I go through those first and make sure they actually describe what I want the feature to do before building it, as in “test-driven development”. AI has a tendency to rewrite tests to match its own implementation if you let it, which is how you end up with bad code.

There are of course more examples, but that would probably go too far into detail. So yeah, AI helps me with development, and I still write and fix code myself. The parts that always stay with me are deciding what to build, how it should work and look, and making sure it actually behaves the way I intended.

This turned out to be longer than I expected, but I know this is a sensitive subject and I wanted to be as transparent as possible.

Wow, it really is very similar. I hadn’t seen this app. I suppose that’s a result of using Material Design 3 guidelines… I think the same happened with Material Design 1 and 2 as well, all apps started to look the same.

We might have different definitions of what vibe coding is, but fair enough. What’s your concern with it? If it’s quality or security, I’m happy to answer whatever you want to know.

I wouldn’t call it vibe coded, but yes, I do use AI while coding. I’ve been developing software for about 15 years, and nowadays I use AI to help me code faster. If you find something that doesn’t work, tell me and I’ll try to fix it as soon as possible.

Hey! Yeah, you’re right, I should’ve gone with a different title. I originally built it for myself and my family, thought it turned out pretty well, and figured I’d share it. But, yes, you’re still right. I changed the title.

Like I mentioned in the post, there are no tracking cookies, ads or analytics. The costs are low right now, so I can cover them myself, even with a decent number of users. If a ton of people suddenly start using it, I might need to add some kind of paid option at some point, but everyone already using it keeps what they have for free. I also put that in the terms.

You can also export all your recipes at any time and not lose anything.