alt Hacker NewsOne of the most satisfying and useful applications for AI is handing it the URL for a recipe (replete with 8 paragraphs of useless introductory text, 2 paragraphs dedicated to how to refrigerate the meal, 9 inline advertisements and a mid-scroll ad) and having it return the actual recipe in Markdown in an Obsidian folder.
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Surprisingly, a lot of these recipe websites (even the worst offenders for fluff and ads) have a clean JSON API for getting the recipe directly. I self-host a Mealie instance (https://docs.mealie.io/) which has an "import from URL" feature that uses this. It has rarely if ever failed me.
The other day I did that with a TikTok video! It was infuriatingly vague, so I extracted the mp4 using yt-dlp and fed the video file into Gemini Flash and told it to fill in the missing information and give me back a proper recipe.
I've been maintaining a personal calorie tracker (keeps me entering), and using claude for entering meals has been the perfect experience.
One of my favorite features has been giving a recipe url and having it figure out the calories for that recipe with line-by-line entries for each ingredient. Then it keeps the extracted recipe in markdown format for the next time I want to make it.
Substitutions are also great - "I'm making [such and such recipe], but with half the sugar."
One of the others has been "I had a meal a couple weeks ago at [x restaurant], can you enter that again for right now?" Having the long-term context for entry has been excellent. And a related one, where I upload a photo of the menu, and say which menu items I'm eating and it puts together an estimate for the calorie count.
I lean heavily on a long auto-compacting claude code session for all of this. I have a UI for graphs, history, and simple entries, but claude's been my favorite means of entry by far