alt Hacker NewsShow HN: I vibecoded a 35k LoC recipe app
Over the last 2-3 weeks, I vibecoded the recipe app that I always wished existed - recipeninja.ai . 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.
Background: I’m a startup founder turned investor. I taught myself (bad) PHP in 2000, and picked up Ruby on Rails in 2011. I’d guess 2015 was the last time I wrote a line of Ruby professionally. Last month, I decided to use Windsurf to build a Rails 8 API backend and React front-end app, using OpenAI's realtime API for voice-to-voice responses. Over the last few days, I also used Claude Code and Gemini 2.5 Pro for some of the trickier features. 35,000 LoC later, this is what I built!
The site uses function-calling to navigate the site in realtime as you chat with the voice assistant, which I think is pretty neat.
For the long version, see https://tomblomfield.com/post/778601470234918912/vibecoding-...
I'd love any feedback you have!
Demo video of the voice assistant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kRhVc9D5kcg
Generate and edit new recipes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VwwZF6dHcHg
Comments
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!
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.
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.
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...
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-...
This timeline is so cursed I can't tell if this is real or just an April Fools joke.
Opened and the first recipe was “Thick white cum soup”, glad I’m my mobile phone, not at work
It feels like Jian Yang and Big Head are making a new app
Amazing! Truly the frontier of technology. Now imagine if every recipe was an NFT, stored in the blockchain!!
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
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
> 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
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.
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.
"White Power Waffles"? You may want to double-check your examples.
https://www.recipeninja.ai/recipe/r_0a8wYxMgm1zFSw/white-pow...
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).
It looks like OP will be learning a thing or two about content moderation.
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?
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
I can tell. Ingredients. 1 skillet.
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...
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.
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.
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?
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.
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)
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!
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
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.
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..
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.
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.
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.
I always wanted to know how to do an Uranium Bomb:
https://www.recipeninja.ai/recipe/r_SOv9sTmzAz3cg4/uranium-b...
I'm joking NSA.
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
Feedback:
I would tell the AI to avoid recipes that contain bodily fluids.
> https://www.recipeninja.ai/recipe/r_vBiLoIJK7qsUc7/cum-panca...
https://www.recipeninja.ai/recipe/r_WHeXRD7qXHV0Vr/cyanide-i...
Ah yes, they just don't make cyanide ice cream like grandma used to
> 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.
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?
Would love to see a git repo
Ah yes, exactly as Ottolenghi would've presented it! https://www.recipeninja.ai/recipe/r_h7nU7K03fLU1W7/ottolengh...
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?
I'm scaling the heroku database right now, which caused a little bit of downtime :-/
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.
Couldn't you just have installed wordpress and a theme?
Missed an opportunity to call it "Vibe Cooking"
> 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.