Small details, big difference. That’s the whole idea
Posts by Cooklang (Alexey)
Step screen. Used during actual cooking — ingredients appear in order of appearance in the recipe step.
Mise en place screen. Used at the start of cooking when you gather everything and do prep. Ideally this should use pantry config order, but for now it uses aisle config order, which is close enough. When we have pantry support we’ll fix
Recipe details screen. People use this to quickly check ingredients while planning and hopping between recipes. We display them alphabetically for quick look up.
Shopping list screen is used in… a shop. If the user has an aisle.conf file, we show sections and ingredients in exact order. I set up sorting to match my shop layout — ingredients appear as you pass them. That’s why all my shopping takes 10–15 minutes.
How to overengineer ingredient sorting in a recipe app 🧵
First it was paywalls. Then cookie banners. Then cloudflare captchas. Now your recipe clipper needs a crypto wallet.
Remember when the internet was about sharing information? Now it's: bot detected → pay $0.003 in USDC on the Base blockchain → here's your casserole recipe.
They sat on this 402 code for 26 years waiting for the right moment and apparently the right moment is "make everything cost money"
So apparently Cloudflare decided the internet needs a toll booth now. They teamed up with Coinbase and built this thing called x402 where your browser has to pay stablecoins just to load a webpage. Like actual crypto. To read a chicken tikka masala recipe.
The server returned HTTP 402. Had to google what that even is. "Payment Required." Bro what
Seems like that status code has been sitting there doing nothing since like 1999. And now someone turned it on.
I have cook.md web-site where users can convert recipes from other sites into Cooklang format. And someone complained that import from Serious Eats doesn’t work.
Somehow I wasn’t aware about that interesting development. Let’s talk about 402 HTTP response code.
What you described is really cool, I now want that to replace simple deterministic pantry in Cookcli 🤩
Sounds pretty cool, does this app still exist?
We immediately jumped on this and reworked timers completely. Beyond AlarmKit, we added visibility across other parts of the system: Live Activities and Dynamic Island, so you can access your timers quickly and easily.
iOS 26 changes that: apps can now use AlarmKit — the same system your morning alarm uses. These timers cut through DND and silent mode. Good luck ignoring them now.
There are hacks of course. Some suggest playing an empty music file and triggering an alarm sound when the timer is up. But that can lead to a ban since it's against App Store rules.
There are critical notifications that can cut through DND and are plenty loud. That would be the ideal solution, but we got rejected when we requested that capability.
In iOS, we're pretty limited when it comes to timers. I've checked many apps (including the Cooklang app) and the experience isn't convincing: the app schedules a local notification, and if you're in silent mode or Do Not Disturb, you never hear it. That's why I usually never set timers in the app
Share a recipe with a friend via QR code in iOS app.
Coming to Brussels for #FOSDEM
Great stuff 👍
If you use Claude Code or Codex or other similar tool, you can use skills I just created github.com/cooklang/coo...
Not really, it has separate thin client and server because I want to reuse it for integrating into mobile apps and offload heavy requests like web-search, etc. The client I can open source, but it's not usable without server.
Another highly requested iOS feature is a mise en place screen, which highlights all ingredient prep upfront—so you don’t discover halfway through cooking that the onions were supposed to be chopped.
Also very experimental image to cooklang: you can take a screenshot from whatsapp and convert to cook file
Or picture from a cookbook
iOS app now can import recipes form the browser
Pricing: €10/month for the first 100 users. AI APIs aren’t cheap, and I’m still learning real usage patterns 😅
Refunds available if it’s not for you.
Install for macOS/Linux & report issues:
github.com/cook-md/cook...
Feedback very welcome.
- Alex
Basically, you can ask Cookbot to do almost anything with your recipes.
Because Cooklang recipes are just files, the AI can reason about them deeply.
Powered by Claude Sonnet - great at following instructions and thinking clearly.
Meet Cookbot 🤖
It lets you work with your recipes as files:
• find top-rated recipes you might like
• build a 3-day meal plan
• normalize metadata
• convert units to metric
• tweak recipes (healthier, substitutions, etc.)
…and more.