6 months ago my baby started to eat actual food instead of formula-slop. That meant I had to cook 10x more often than before, so I needed help.
So I decided to do the first thing that comes to every parent's mind at that time - build a fully agentic cooking app.
Import via URL, photo, text
Introducing Sous Chef - a cooking app with an AI sidekick.
My 1st problem - my recipes were in the NYT Cooking app, Arc bookmarks, chats with my mom, Obsidian & the Notes app. Sous Chef imports recipes from any URL, text or a photo and formats them while getting rid of the recipe writer's personal story.
Import from TikTok, IG, YouTube
My TikTok and IG algo also figured out I was a tired parent cooking dinners daily - so I was fed a looot of cheffluencer content that ended up in my Saved folder.
You can share any TikTok, IG or YouTube video to Sous Chef, it transcribes the video + caption and adds a perfectly formatted recipe.
Edits
During cooking, you can ask Sous Chef to make any edits to the recipe - ingredient swaps, increasing portions, fibermaxx the dish etc.
It's pretty handy - makes edits very fast, edits anything including ingredients or cooking instructions and still keeps changes easy to reverse.
MCP!
You can also bring your own agent to Sous Chef! If you have ever brainstormed a recipe with CC - now you can store those recipes in Sous Chef.
It's also an MCP app - so the cooking UX becomes much nicer directly in the chat. (ChatGPT plugin is waiting on approval!)
Explore tab with RAG and all
If you are also looking for inspiration and don't want to search, the agent has access to ±8000 high-quality recipes. It can do a really smart search to find a relevant recipe for any situation.
AI categorisation
I love things to be organised, but I don't always love the process of organising. So Sous Chef also auto-categorises recipes for you. It always keeps between 5-10 categories so that it's not overwhelming and rethinks if previous categories make sense every once in a while.
Other learnings
On top of the above, I also learned a lot while building this.
- Building a conversational onboarding is awesome! But it's pretty different from building a chat/agent. You need way more boundaries.
- Building and running evals on new models is fun! And OpenRouter makes it sooo easy. You no longer need to have FOMO on new model launches.
- I'm also experimenting with programmatic and self-driving SEO loops to drive traffic to the website. My agent does weekly checks and comes up with ideas on how to improve SEO.
The thing that didn't work - generating images for recipes is bad bad bad. I don't know why I even tried.
Bye?
The app is still free. Hopefully this doesn't go super viral, so that I don't go bankrupt soon.