Hi all,
This is a follow up post to my AI meal planner post from several months ago. I’m never quite sure whether these things will stick, but this one has, and I’ve used it consistently since then. This means that I have data for analysis (fun!) and I can reflect on the experience, which is the topic of today’s post.
Surprises
Surprisingly, I find that I do more of the meal planning myself now and use the AI less often to do the brainstorming. I think it’s because I now spend a lot more time thinking about food, reading about food, or seeking out cooking shows to watch. The AI doesn’t have the context I do and doesn’t know I just saw a great recipe for chicken and rice. My self assessment is that I’m now better at meal planning than I was before, but perhaps I’m just happy that AI use hasn’t rotted my brain.
AI as Dictation Tool
On the flip side, I’ve noticed that the AI is an excellent sort of dictation tool and this has brought on a certain laziness. I can just casually enter things into the chat, chock full of typos, or the briefest of phrases, and the AI will neatly format and enter text into the meal plan. Same for the shopping list, and it will neatly sort cream into the “dairy” section of my list, and potatoes into the “produce” category. I don’t want to bother with spelling or formatting anymore, I’d rather the AI did that for me. (Although, I’m still writing blog posts myself, albeit often with AI feedback and editing.)
The Analysis
I asked the AI to analyze the past several months of meals. This can be fun, because in many ways, this is how I might describe my own cooking:
Your cooking style is a distinct mix of eclectic global comfort food, high-flavor shortcut meals, and low-friction "survival" nights.
More importantly, AI was also excellent at pointing out things I might not have noticed myself. For example, cabbage has crept in as the most popular vegetable (not something I would have expected a year ago), I could add more beans and lentils to the mix, and for such a globally inspired diet, I don’t really cook Indian food.
Maybe This Was Just the Training
Anyway, despite doing most of the meal planning myself, I asked it to try planning another week or two, and the past several months of data are now a great training set for my cooking style. If I ask the AI to create a plan without repeating anything from my meal plan history, it actually does a pretty decent job.
But it doesn't know I want to make that Jacques Pépin recipe I saw on YouTube.
Cheers,
Sam Feller
aka THE Awkward Engineer
P.S.
Some half-baked thoughts on meal planning tools:
I’ve actually thought a bit more about what it means to build and share these tools. I know that I’m not the only person who’s built a meal planner. I know others who’ve gone a step farther and connected tools to Instacart, so that the shopping is AI driven as well. (I still enjoy going to the store myself.)
But I’ve also met a few people who’ve expressed interest in using my planning tool.
This is where I think there’s an interesting new world. These tools are so tailorable and adaptable, but I think making the most of them means understanding yourself and what will work for you. Perhaps, it also means changing yourself.
I think that the ability to change both the yourself and the tool to achieve a new system, is in and of itself, another skill.
The closest analogy I can think of to this situation is to working with a coach, or a tutor, who can help you figure out how to develop to new skills or behaviors. I think an import facet of working with a coach is that they can help you push through discomfort. I think there’s a certain element of trust in the coach, that even though what they’re teaching might be hard at this point in time, there will be a payoff for sticking with it.
In other words, I think if trying to productive a meal planner, the world divides into people who can build their own meal planners, and people who need help building meal planners. In which case, the product really needs to be a coach. But will people trust an AI coach the way they would a real person? There’s so much more, psychologically, why we’ll listen to a real person.
I’m very curious to try the meal plan coaching approach. And I’m sure we’ll learn more as these tools spread.
Anway… my two cents.