What problem & for whom
For whom: People who open the fridge, see perfectly good vegetables, and still end up with olive oil and salt, because creativity in the kitchen doesn't come naturally to everyone.
Problem: "I have lettuce, tomato, avocado. Vinaigrette? Yogurt?" They want a quick answer and a real recipe.
This: Pick ingredients, get a matching dressing + recipe + one kitchen trick. One click. Done.
The iteration
The original layout was a vertical stack of boxes, wasting all the horizontal space desktop offers. I moved to a side-by-side layout so both panels are visible at once. On mobile, the output box peeks from below. The same logic applies to onboarding: there's a line asking you to pick at least one ingredient, but let's be honest, most users won't read it. I added an animation that highlights the ingredients one by one, making every next step obvious without relying on anyone reading anything. Turns out, it's also just fun.
What AI could and couldn't do
I wanted ingredients to appear visually on a plate as you picked them, a little game where your salad builds itself in real time. The AI only rendered colored dots (red for tomato, green for cucumber). The plate didn't make it. That taught me something worth keeping: AI is better at language than at spatial visualization, at least today. The fun moved from the plate to the ingredients themselves, the animation that guides you through them is where the playfulness lives now.
Minimum viable effort
One click = one salad with dressing and recipe. The goal was simple: as few steps as possible. Then one less.
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