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Show HN: I vibecoded a 35k LoC recipe app

by tomblomfield on 4/2/25, 1:57 AM with 242 comments

• by nine_k on 4/2/25, 2:37 AM

  Impressive!

  35 kLOC is quite a bit. I wonder how straightforward and maintainable this app ended up to be. This would require taking a look at the sources. While good Rails code tends to be very terse, frontend may be quite voluminous.

  > I believe within a couple of months, when things like log tailing and automated testing and native version control get implemented

  This sounds a bit too optimistic, especially around automated testing, but yes, eventually this all will be there.

  > an extremely powerful tool for even non-technical people to write production-quality apps

  But why would non-technical people would even think in terms of log tailing and version control, any more than they think about the gauge of wiring in their walls, or the kind of modulation their Wi-Fi device use? For really non-technical audience to make a good use of such tools, it won't just take the AI to be a competent coder. The AI should become a competent architect and a competent senior SWE to translate from the product management language to the software development language, without even surfacing it when not explicitly asked. It's going to be quite a bit of a challenge to make it work, and work about as reliably as with a human team.

• by iambateman on 4/2/25, 3:49 AM

  I also wrote a recipe simplifying website, so this is a fun project to see. Incredible work!

  Probably the main value engineers have for a maintenance project is context. I wonder what happens when we fully cede context to the machines...

  Today, I got a request at work for a feature ("let's offer coupons!") that I thought would take a week. That was until I found out that another engineer wrote most of the code last year, and it'd take him a day to dust off.

  I'm totally onboard with, and grateful for, larger-scale experiments like this...thanks for putting the effort in. I wonder how well Cursor (or similar) would handle a situation in which large amounts of code are _almost_ being used. What if 3k LOC accidentally get duplicated? Can our automated systems understand that and fix it? Because if they can't, a human is going to spend a _long_ time trying to figure out what happened.

  Over the next 18 months, I expect we'll hear a few stories of the LLM accidentally reimplementing an entire feature in a separate code path. It's a whole new class of bugs! :D

• by GaryNumanVevo on 4/2/25, 8:13 AM

  > The app’s security is not perfect, but I’m pretty happy with it for the scale I’m at. If I continue to grow and get more abuse, I’ll implement more robust measures.

  The app literally exposes his OpenAI key.

• by apgwoz on 4/2/25, 6:11 AM

  Help! I just made the Diarrhea Walnuts (https://www.recipeninja.ai/recipe/r_N1VSPtXzCJVV3l/diarrhea-...) recipe and it turns out I am allergic to Walnuts! I am throwing up everywhere! You’re gonna be hearing from my lawyers!

• by osigurdson on 4/2/25, 4:59 AM

  I have a paid subscription to Windsurf using Claude. I struggle to find much utility in terms of actually writing code. It spends a lot of time trying / retrying and glitching out. I'm sure in a couple of years it will be amazing (assuming a fundamental breakthrough isn't required) but it isn't quite there yet.

  LLMs are super useful but currently, the primary use case is teaching, not doing. For this reason, I think ChatGPT is really just as good as an AI enabled editor (or both if you don't mind paying for two subscriptions).

• by pzo on 4/2/25, 8:00 AM

  > using OpenAI's realtime API for voice-to-voice responses

  Does it mean it use this expensive open ai audio model in the app? Don't you worry this will make it bankrupt if app goes viral and not monetised?

  Can you share what's your strategy here, like topup $2000 open ai account as kind of marketing expenses for users to try for free? Genuine questions since planning to use openai audio API in other case and this kind of expensive price worry me a lot even if switching to new mini-transcribe and mini-tts

• by jumploops on 4/2/25, 6:02 AM

  Glad you finally found Claude Code useful, Tom ;)

  On a more serious note: I've found that for debugging difficult issues, o1 Pro is in a league of it's own.

  Claude Code's eagerness to do work will often fix things given enough time, especially for self-contained pieces of software, but I still find myself going to o1 Pro more often than I'd expect.

  A coworker and I did a comparison the other day, where we fired up o1 Pro and Claude Code with the same refactor. o1 Pro one-shotted it, while Claude Code took a few iterations.

  Interestingly enough, the _thinking_ time of o1 Pro led us to just commit the Claude Code changes, as they were both finished in around the same time (1 min 37s vs. 2+ minutes), however we did end up using some feedback from o1 to fix an issue Claude hadn't caught. YMMV

• by rsaz on 4/2/25, 2:18 AM

  Is the key feature here just the voice control? I’m wondering what you feel is missing from other popular recipe websites/trackers, and why I would choose to use this over something with more care put into it.

  Or, was this mostly just an exercise in engineering/testing AI?

• by vander_elst on 4/2/25, 7:23 AM

  I think this needs a NSFW added to the title, on the first page at the moment there are at least 50% of NSFW recipes.

• by jorisnoo on 4/2/25, 3:44 AM

  I love how the top recipe shows a literal stuffed lamb, e.g. a plush toy. Lots of the generated images have an early deep dream vibe

• by a_c on 4/2/25, 7:35 AM

  While I'm not going to make any food according to the recipes yet, the recipes gave me good chuckle. I'm always amazed by the creativity people have, a feeling that dissipates the moment I know something is AI generated. Comprehensive JavaScript Tutorial https://www.recipeninja.ai/recipe/r_VDcP5QiJjAPVhV/comprehen... is my favourite so far.

• by nwroot on 4/2/25, 3:49 AM

  I can tell. Ingredients. 1 skillet.

• by ttd on 4/2/25, 3:48 AM

  Is this a serious thing? If so, I'd like to know where I can purchase the wasp meat required to make this recipe: https://www.recipeninja.ai/recipe/r_NYrbOKZEyqrp7r/wasp-meat...

• by Quarondeau on 4/2/25, 8:33 AM

  "White Power Waffles"? You may want to double-check your examples.

  https://www.recipeninja.ai/recipe/r_0a8wYxMgm1zFSw/white-pow...

• by Yiling-J on 4/2/25, 3:56 AM

  I think the recipes on your site are AI-generated? If you're looking to generate a large number of recipes, I highly recommend my tool: https://github.com/Yiling-J/tablepilot. It's specifically designed for this kind of task. Don't forget to check out the examples folder, I use recipes as examples a lot.

• by NackerHughes on 4/2/25, 1:09 PM

  Could you 'vibecode' a website that tells us where to get the ingredients? I don't know where around here I'm going to find some werewolf-harvested honey...

  https://www.recipeninja.ai/recipe/r_XbZvrH23kS6FwN/werewolf-...

• by tombert on 4/2/25, 2:17 AM

  I still haven't done the AI vibe coding, but I think I get a similar effect with the Conjure plugin for Neovim with Clojure.

  Being able to type out and immediately execute it directly in the window, and even have your code replaced by the output, is kind of life-changing. It fundamentally changes the way you write code, like the REPL isn't just a quick way to test your code, but a direct helper to test the stuff that you right.

  I did a project in Clojure recently, heavily using Conjure, and then my next project was in Rust. Rust has nice Neovim plugins as well, but it still kind of felt like a step backwards; I found myself reaching for the "automatically evaluate" keystrokes that don't exist on Rust.

• by russellbeattie on 4/2/25, 4:07 AM

  Quick note: In my opinion, the ai-generated food pictures are deep in the uncanny valley. Unappetizingly so. The hollandaise sauce image is disturbing in a way that's hard to describe, which somehow makes it worse.

• by Retr0id on 4/2/25, 2:14 AM

  I type "lasagne", hit enter, some things pop up and disappear before I can read them, and then I get a solid white screen. (in Firefox)

• by DeathArrow on 4/2/25, 7:18 AM

  I don't think I would want to cook and eat AI generated recipes. I don't like to read AI generated texts and I don't like to listen to AI generated music.

  You can call me a snob, but I appreciate some things only if they are the result of work and creativity of humans.

• by s2th4d on 4/2/25, 2:11 AM

  Well this is a good start, I tried searching for “Anti-inflammatory” and the app crashed. Likely that scaling is way out of proportion considering it’s here on HN , but do you have any load balancing or caching setup? Debouncing on the inputs?

• by DidYaWipe on 4/2/25, 4:07 AM

  What is "vibecoded" supposed to mean?

• by Tainnor on 4/2/25, 5:17 AM

  Thank you for that ice water recipe, really wouldn't have known how to do that: https://www.recipeninja.ai/recipe/r_8Pq0RPfvVGf2Xw/ice-water...

• by MrVandemar on 4/2/25, 5:43 AM

  "Still, I was determined not to write any code ... I just sat laughing as the computer wrote code."

  I can pop over to Midjourney and be determined not to draw a single line and "sit there laughing" as it draws the Mona Lisa in the style of Salvador Dali but with a turnip instead of a person.

  How is this any different? What is ultimately notable about it? Did any of it make you a better programmer?

  I'm always deeply impressed when people devote significant chunks of their time to achieving extraordinary results. I'm entirely baffled, however, that there's anything at all interesting about using an AI interface to build an AI interface to connect you to AI slop.

  You could have spent 20 hours planting trees or doing some kind of community serivce, and the world would have been a far better place.

• by peterldowns on 4/2/25, 3:47 AM

  Nice work! The voice control is actually really, really cool. I was able to say "show me a chicken tikka masala recipe" which got me 3 recipes, and then I said "show me the third one" and it opened nearly instantly. Pretty awesome. I want this for my entire computer!

• by iamsaitam on 4/2/25, 11:41 AM

  Programmers are also human just came out with this:

  Interview with Vibe Coder in 2025 https://youtu.be/JeNS1ZNHQs8?si=kQIVpEBUwK3pNvRw

  I think this helps to understand the mindset of a vibe coder better

• by layer8 on 4/2/25, 11:07 AM

  It looks like OP will be learning a thing or two about content moderation.

• by DontchaKnowit on 4/2/25, 5:05 AM

  I understand that this is just kind of a proof of concept exposition of AI capabilities, but I fucking hate it and it is emblematic of the kind of low effort drivel that is infecting the internet. This is totally unusable in every way possible. While technically impressive (that AI can make a pretty-ish and functional website) it is practically useless.

  Also, the photos are some of the most un-appetizing, uncanny valley, shit I've ever seen.

• by groggo on 4/2/25, 6:53 AM

  Nice work! I also made a recipe app, but after seeing the recipes people generated on yours, I'm choosing not to share it at this time.

  Seriously though - vibecoding is great. Even better (or only feasible) as engineers who can dive in when we need to.

  My app is iOS and I had never done any Swift. I do have AI generation but that was more of a fun afterthought. The main utility is extracting recipes from the web and having a synced shopping list that I can share with my wife.

• by NoGravitas on 4/2/25, 4:59 PM

  I heard about it from this article a friend posted to a group chat: https://www.404media.co/vibe-coded-ai-app-generates-recipes-...

  There are a lot of really weird recipes still on there, including cyanide ice cream.

• by bilekas on 4/2/25, 7:18 AM

  Yeah, this is amusing but I would like to see the source that was “vibes” 34k LOC is an outrageous number for something so basic..

• by fmxsh on 4/2/25, 8:17 PM

  Not in position to judge the product, but had me thinking...

  Perhaps this is 1998 again, when you could earn big money on creating a visitor-counter service, or a guest book service.

  Perhaps, now is the time for a lot of smaller projects with AI, that will, in a few years, all be blasted off the market by big corporations and change in trends.

• by personjerry on 4/2/25, 3:51 AM

  https://www.recipeninja.ai/recipe/r_WHeXRD7qXHV0Vr/cyanide-i...

  Ah yes, they just don't make cyanide ice cream like grandma used to

• by jl6 on 4/2/25, 7:10 AM

  I assume the insane recipes are generated from users’ prompts, so you might want some content warning or moderation. Kinda cool though that it generates recipes for anything, regardless of if it involves food.

• by amanzi on 4/2/25, 7:47 AM

  This timeline is so cursed I can't tell if this is real or just an April Fools joke.

• by lesostep on 4/2/25, 2:04 PM

  Some characters break links. Try searching "Луковый угар". None of the previews could generate any working links

  The recipe still exists though: https://www.recipeninja.ai/recipe/r_UptD1AgJYvvXWm/%D0%9B%D1...

• by maxlin on 4/2/25, 7:05 AM

  Because the app shows entirely unfiltered "crowdsourced" latest recipes which of course are ridiculous given this is public, I first thought this was some high effort april fools joke on vibe coding, AI slop and the insecurity / thoughtlessness of the results.

  But there is some quality in it, I can't argue against that

• by geitir on 4/2/25, 2:26 AM

  Would love to see a git repo

• by wazoox on 4/2/25, 7:27 AM

  Obviously your fish recipes are the best, well done sir :) Apparently most people aren't aware of the date...

• by nerptastic on 4/2/25, 11:30 AM

  Feedback:

  I would tell the AI to avoid recipes that contain bodily fluids.

  > https://www.recipeninja.ai/recipe/r_vBiLoIJK7qsUc7/cum-panca...

• by uzantonomon on 4/2/25, 9:42 AM

  I always wanted to know how to do an Uranium Bomb:

  https://www.recipeninja.ai/recipe/r_SOv9sTmzAz3cg4/uranium-b...

  I'm joking NSA.

• by tomblomfield on 4/2/25, 2:35 AM

  I'm scaling the heroku database right now, which caused a little bit of downtime :-/

• by __loam on 4/2/25, 9:42 AM

  I am horrified that you've produced that much code in such a short amount of time.

• by prawn on 4/2/25, 4:32 AM

  Ah yes, exactly as Ottolenghi would've presented it! https://www.recipeninja.ai/recipe/r_h7nU7K03fLU1W7/ottolengh...

• by blitzar on 4/2/25, 7:16 AM

  I have a few qualms with this app:

  It does not seem very "viral" or income-generating. I know this is premature at this point, but without charging users for the service, is it reasonable to expect to make money off of this?

• by kunalchuadhari on 4/2/25, 5:02 AM

  Interesting... Thanks for putting in the effort. I'm curious, did your previous knowledge of programming help you accept code changes, or do you just keep everything written by agent?

• by deng on 4/2/25, 6:58 AM

  > It now includes a fully interactive voice assistant so you don't need to get your dirty hands over your new iPad when you're cooking.

  Always floored about the problems people think need fixing. The problem is not that you get your dirty hands on the iPad. The problem is that you want real recipes. You know, things people have actually cooked and found to be good. With real photos of how the result actually looks (instead of what an AI thinks it might look based on the description).

  You might be lucky and find these for free someplace on the web. However, those LLMs that "vibecoded" this Rails app for you are now also used to flood the web with garbage recipes, so finding good recipes on the web will become much, much harder than it already is. I browsed through the recipes and could not find a single one that actually looks real, so at the moment, you are just adding to this problem. This is why people still buy physical cooking books. The good ones are made with sturdy, thick paper so that you can get your dirty hands on them. This is what cooking is all about. Only unused cooking books stay clean.

• by jorisnoo on 4/2/25, 9:02 AM

  Love it! I went to fix an easy sandwich and ended up building my own recipe app:

  https://www.recipeninja.ai/recipe/r_iEyaSAKCQlzl4Q/vibes-and...

  But then, as with most llm tools, the fun wore off after a few minutes of playing with it.

• by johnisgood on 4/2/25, 9:19 AM

  Is this even legal? It was on the main page.

  https://www.recipeninja.ai/recipe/r_dxF7OQ0O3IGXOw/actual-co...

  I bet there might be a recipe of a bomb somewhere, too.[1]

  April's Fools or not, I think you could get in legal trouble, but IANAL.

  [1] Apparently there is: https://www.recipeninja.ai/recipe/r_SOv9sTmzAz3cg4/uranium-b...

• by ada1981 on 4/2/25, 2:09 AM

  This is great. Want to come demo it in the weekly EarthPilot.ai AI Playground tomorrow at 11est?

  Http://earthpilot.com/play and then join at AnthonyDavidAdams.com/zoom at 11 for show and tell.

  I’m making a non-fiction book writing agent and I’d love to better understand how you used function calling to navigate the website!

• by floppiplopp on 4/2/25, 7:20 AM

  Is this satire making fun of 'AI'? I cannot tell. But it looks and feels like satire.

• by a012 on 4/2/25, 6:45 AM

  Opened and the first recipe was “Thick white cum soup”, glad I’m my mobile phone, not at work

• by 4ndrewl on 4/2/25, 8:25 AM

  Couldn't you just have installed wordpress and a theme?

• by agluszak on 4/2/25, 7:49 AM

  Ai slop for generating more ai slop!

• by HPsquared on 4/2/25, 8:24 AM

  Missed an opportunity to call it "Vibe Cooking"

• by tajulislam22 on 4/2/25, 5:49 AM

  This is so crazy. How did you gather recepies

• by brcmthrowaway on 4/2/25, 4:26 AM

  How does one learn to vibe code

• by admiralrohan on 4/2/25, 5:04 AM

  Thanks for sharaing your journey, I have few observations

  1. When I click on a recipe from home page it is maintaining the scroll position, so I am not seeing the top of the screen. Is this deliberate?

  2. "Recipe Ninja was vibecoded by Tom in San Francisco." Will it increase of decrease trust in your system for users?

  3. To remove AI changing random files, I use "Copy relative path" to tell AI which file to change (there is a keyboard shortcut too). Not fully vibe coding but can be useful for precision bug fixing.

  Good luck with the project.

• by lwansbrough on 4/2/25, 6:48 AM

  Every recipe is cum bro

• by rmnclmnt on 4/2/25, 7:18 AM

  It feels like Jian Yang and Big Head are making a new app

• by munksbeer on 4/2/25, 1:29 PM

  Wow, I can't believe how many people seem to be missing the point here and being overly negative. The fact that you can have an ai assistant code something like this by giving it instructions would be utterly miraculous 10 years ago, even less.

  Whatever the ultimate usefulness of the website is, the point is using it is slick. It works and it works well.

  Very nice demo of vibe coding Tom. I appreciate it.

• by dbbljack on 4/2/25, 4:10 AM

  the microphone symbol should be animated while listening.

• by Xophmeister on 4/2/25, 8:30 AM

  April fools day has messed with my ability to identify satire at this time of year. Let's look at the evidence:

  Posting date: 2025-04-02T01:57:13 1743559033 <-- too late

  LoC: 35,000 <-- That's a _lot_

  Front page: "Elon Musk Dirty Pants", "Heroin Hashbrowns", "AI Slop Stew", "Sweet Tooth Delight Made with Human Teeth" <-- WTF?

  This is a joke, right?

• by foragerdev on 4/2/25, 5:00 AM

  took forever to open.

• by hansmayer on 4/2/25, 8:17 AM

  I mean I guess kudos to you for being creative and building something, even if its with the so-called vibe-coding. But LoC is not the metric I would use to describe any app I've built, or that I am building.

• by worik on 4/3/25, 6:59 PM

  This is a warning.

  Heed it

• by ilaksh on 4/2/25, 6:25 AM

  People are putting disgusting nonsense in there. Maybe add an AI review step to block that stuff. Let them do the whole recipe, then just block it.

• by low_tech_love on 4/2/25, 5:35 AM

  Amazing! Truly the frontier of technology. Now imagine if every recipe was an NFT, stored in the blockchain!!

• by herrherrmann on 4/2/25, 12:38 PM

  [flagged]

• by liendolucas on 4/2/25, 8:58 AM

  A cooking web app 35k LoC? Wow, the author might be surprised to know that an entire OS kernel can be programmed at a fraction of that count. I can safely say that the days where we compained about JS bloat can be put aside, this is a whole new league by itself.

  Sane advice: learn to program, put the AI hype/drug aside and do yourself a favor. It's an invaluable lifetime skill knowing to program from scratch and perhaps unassisted coding will be a looked-after skill in the years to come.

• by gherard5555 on 4/2/25, 8:47 AM

  please stop saying vibecoding it makes me wanna kms

• by anonzzzies on 4/2/25, 3:40 AM

  That is nice actually. Recipe sites are so annoying where I have to scroll for an hour to see the ingredients. Thanks!

• by notachatbot123 on 4/2/25, 8:29 AM

  Stop ruining the commons please, it is a horrible ethical crime to flood the internet with AI-generated garbage.

• by dmos62 on 4/2/25, 5:36 AM

  Ok, I think this is actually the best recipe app I've used. Well done!