Show HN: Generate 'Cooking For Engineers' style recipe cards

2 ekglimmer 2 7/2/2025, 3:18:54 PM gobsmacked.io ↗
Hi HN,

I have been working on a project which can automatically convert a recipe to the tree/graph/tabular style notation that pops up on HN every now and then. It's still early days but I am keen to hear about improvements I can make to the recipe presentation.

For reference, the earliest example I have seen of this style of notation is from 'Cooking For Engineers' (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30797907) but I have seen other, similar notations from time to time.

This is my take on the notation, as well as the ability to convert recipes automatically. In the future, I would like to see it become my own personal kitchen/recipe management system but I would first like to improve the recipe display options.

It uses GPT-4o to format the recipe into a JSON tree structure, which is then rendered with CSS grid. So far it works well enough but there is definitely some recipes that are impossible to render, and of course GPT-4o will occasionally spit out less-than-useful trees. I have been using AppWrite for the backend.

Curious to hear everyone's thoughts and what people might like to see!

Comments (2)

CaptainJack · 1h ago
That's great, I really like it. My main thought is that most of non-american engineers favor SI units, so getting values in cups, ounces and pounds is not too great.

A possible improvement would be to replace freedom units with their international counterpart (with sane rounding to a two digits precision, or similar).

ekglimmer · 32m ago
Thank you! I agree completely. Right now it just uses the units in the original recipe, but being able to toggle between the two is definitely something I would like to do.