I (Finally) Created a Killer App

A surprisingly useful application of Generative AI and GizmoCMS

Start with a Little Inspiration

I recently read an article in the Washington Post about trendy chefs using Generative AI to create new recipes. What a creative and potentially hazardous idea! That got me thinking about my own modest endeavors in the kitchen. I try not to spend a lot of time there, but I’m the boss when it’s time to plan and cook holiday dinners.

Planning is the worst part. A few days before each holiday I pull up a few of my favorite recipes I’ve saved in Google Docs from dinners past, and then I try to find a couple of new ones to keep things interesting. No fancy recipe apps for me. I Google until I find something with a nice picture that looks tasty and then click to have a look. Then I wade through the vast expanse of advertisements to search for the figurative meat — the list of ingredients and the basic steps to make the dish.

I understand we all need to make a living, but there are so many ads these recipes are just barely short of useless. I say “barely short” because, well, I still rely on them to help me deliver a satisfying meal.

Here’s how I arrived at the inspiration for my “Killer App”. I Google “recipes” and Chrome shows me many nice pictures. Ah, here’s a yummy one. Who doesn’t like cheesy potatoes?

I give it a click, and indeed, it looks dreamy, once I’ve waded past all the ads. Then, Boom!, inspiration strikes.

Lately, I’ve been spending a lot of time investigating and writing about Generative AI, see Generative AI on the Cheap and Will AI Replace Software Engineers. That, and the aforementioned article from the Post inspired an experiment. I asked ChatGPT:

ChatGPT gives me the perfect response!

This is starting to feel very useful already — I avoided all the ads and ChatGPT did all the work. Plus, I made a new friend:

The next step in my traditional, highly inefficient but well-worn process is to copy something like the above into a Google Doc to save it until the holiday looms.

Then, as the next holiday approaches, I gather up all the recipes for my highly anticipated dinner, pick my favorites, and then brace myself for the worst step of all — merging all of the ingredients across the different recipes into a single shopping list.

Scratch that, grocery shopping right before a holiday is the worst step, but this is a close second.

I wondered if ChatGPT could handle this one too. It’s a tough problem, as it requires converting the ingredients to common units before they can be added up and merged into a single shopping list, one ingredient per line.

Here’s an example. Suppose that, in addition to cheesy potatoes, I also want to make regular mashed potatoes for those finicky traditionalists in my family. I find a great recipe, and concatenate the ingredients for both potato recipes into one list:

4 russet potatoes, sliced into thin rounds
1/4 cup butter
1 small onion, finely chopped
1/4 cup all-purpose flour
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon ground black pepper
2 cups milk
2 cups shredded Cheddar cheese
5 pounds potatoes (I use half Yukon Gold, half Russet potatoes)
2 large cloves garlic, minced
fine sea salt
6 tablespoons butter
1 cup whole milk
4 ounces cream cheese, room temperature
toppings: chopped fresh chives or green onions, freshly-cracked black pepper

This is copied verbatim from the recipes. Notice that the first recipe lists the number of potatoes needed while the second provides the quantity of potatoes in pounds. Let’s see what ChatGPT can do with this:

And here’s what ChatGPT says:

Wow. Are you as impressed as I am? ChatGPT will even explain its reasoning if you ask it to.

I know what you’re thinking. There are plenty of purpose-built recipe apps out there that do exactly this. You can get first rate recipes from, say, the New York Times for $50/yr, and there are plenty of free recipe apps on the App Store. But, this kind of “free” isn’t really free. It guarantees plenty of advertisements or solicitations for in-app purchases. On the other hand, this was easy, fun, and free as in “free beer”, and a whole lot more interesting than downloading an app.

Automate with GizmoCMS

We’ve now got a “Killer Process” for holiday planning, but not a “Killer App”. We can turn our process into a Killer App using GizmoCMS, a handy, free personal Knowledge and Content Management Web App that integrates with Gemini’s free API — Google’s answer to ChatGPT — to automate our process.

We’ll start by creating a new content type called “Recipe” and add two properties to it: instructions and ingredients.

Figure 1 — Add a Recipe Content Type

Next, let’s use Gizmo to ask Gemini for the ingredients for Au Gratin Potatoes using the url to the recipe, then use Gizmo to copy the results into the new Recipe’s “ingredients” property:

Figure 2 — Ask Gemini to Summarize the Ingredients for our Recipes

If you’ve used Generative AI before (and whom amongst us hasn’t), then you know that writing good prompts takes some practice. The prompt in the figure above above works well, so let’s use it to repeat the process again for the basic mashed potatoes recipe:

Summarize the ingredients including the quantity and units for each ingredient for this recipe: https://www.allrecipes.com/recipe/24771/basic-mashed-potatoes/.

Perfect. We’ve now got the ingredients for both recipes and we just need to combine them into one shopping list. Here’s a prompt that works perfectly:

Combine this list of ingredients into a shopping list, converting each ingredient to common units so that ingredients are combined into one line item for each: ${ingredients}

Here we are using Gizmo’s variable substitution feature to automaticaly replace the ${ingredients} placeholder with the concatenated ingredients from the two recipes we saved previously.

See the result below. It’s just what we’re looking for, thank you Gemini. Now create a ToDo for “Holiday Planning” and use the “Copy To” feature to copy the result into the ToDo’s summary field. And we’re all set. Just in time for the holidays.

Figure 3 — Prompt Gemini to Combine Our Ingredient Lists into a Single Shopping List

Final Words

We’ve done it, at long last — created a “Killer App”. Or perhaps Google and Open AI have created Killer Apps and we’ve just tagged along for the ride. Either way, the next big holiday is Thanksgiving, and I’m sure I’ll be serving both Au Gratin and Mashed Potatoes.

Check out GizmoCMS, my free personal Content Management System, powered by AI. Handle your Todos, Notes, Diagrams and more, right in your browser, 100% free.