Batch

My partner and I cook together most nights. We have different goals: they track protein, I track calories. We eat the same dish. Every week we'd make the same five recipes and neither of us hit our targets. Restaurants solve this with a fixed menu.

The actual problem is simultaneous optimization. Not just plan meals. Find seven dinners that hit two different people's macro targets at once, using the same ingredients. A standard meal planner works for one person. This needed to work for both.

I built a constraint solver in FastAPI that chooses recipes and then calculates portions per person so weekly targets land exactly. Then I had to design a UI that made the whole thing legible.

Personal use case stressed every decision immediately. No research phase, no we'll test it later. I live with this product. Every flow, every button, every error message gets tested the night I ship it.

Built in React first, then Figma for structure and aesthetics, then back to React for production. Learned that jumping between code and design is messy but forces you to think about what's actually buildable.

The solver is the design. The UI doesn't fight it or hide it. It translates constraint programming into human language.