Have you ever been looking up a recipe for something new and been stymied by the directions being a wall of text, especially to find that one detail right when you’re in the middle of making the dish? Recipe Lanes by [bohemian-miser] leverages an LLM to create flow charts to make the process more straightforward.
As someone who has mostly avoided LLM use thus far, I found the examples in the Gallery helped inform what the LLM was expecting for prompts as my first attempts were unsuccessful. Once you know the language expected from the computer, you can get it to generate icons for each ingredient and a flow chart of the steps to cook the food. While it does organize the chart when it is generated, each element can be independently moved across the canvas to put things in a more sensible order, especially as I found it can generate elements with overlapping text.
The 8-bit icon style and button text on the site give it a fun bit of flair that adds to the overall experience. The tool is still in its infancy, but it’s Open Source, so we hope to see it improve over time. If you’d like to see some more interesting kitchen hacks, how about ramen in edible packaging, this rotary phone kitchen timer, or these automated Arduino splash guards.
wow.
alright.
this is just downright miserable.
Why?
agreed, this is a miss
holy moly this is bad. Maybe a maze would be more helpful :p
I thought it was pretty cool.
You guys are all haters.
Still not as bad as the twine wrapped old tire table.
HaD editors your going to have to up your game to get down to that level.
But a respectable effort.
Worst since the 3d printed kids bike at least.
This steaming pile gets extra points for the GD herbivore ingredients.
What a suckup.
As an adult, you are expected to know how to read. If you can’t, then you need to complain to your school board and your government because they have failed you.
I’d a damn sight rather have a “wall of text” than a disorganized cartoon for the illiterate.
You alone are responsible for your illiterateness. It’s just too easy to put the fault on other. And on the very first responsible, I’d accuse your parent, not the school or the government.
You must work in education or government, because I can’t believe you just posted something this odd.
If what you said is true, then why do we pay taxes to provide for general EDUCATION?
Because basic reading it a skill learned by smart people before their school years?
Which then compounds up, despite the drek the teachers require the kid to read.
In my experience American public schools are at best baby sitters, for unfireable teachers.
The kids still learn from the parents, or learn nothing.
Sometimes the parents don’t know anything good to teach the kids.
How generations of (MBAs/thieves/cops/politicians) propagate.
in what country do you life in ? here kids gfet teache din first grade how to read write and some math.
Wow; should I tell the analysts I work with that creating diagrams is only required because they’re illiterate?
Shoving a wall of text at an AI and getting back a diagram that is even 50% correct is awesome.
I cut and paste a craptastic blog recipe and this thing sequenced it correctly and diagramed it reaosnably.
The only issue I have is the authors license blurb.
But why waste perfectly edible crayons on creating diagrams?
Would an llm for the kitchen be an allium?
I like it. I agree with the wall of text. Utilizing an LLM to convert text to flowchart seems to be a good idea.
I’m mostly an LLM skeptic, but I find this useful as well. Despite comments to the contrary, I can indeed read, but sometimes dense text isn’t the most useful way to parse information while in the middle of a task, at least for me.
Sequencing in recipes would melt a systems analyst brain if interpreted literally. This highlights those failures instantly.
god, this is depressing. when did this place become AI-a-day?
“Have you ever been looking up a recipe for something new and been stymied by the directions being a wall of text?” when reading recipes that were written by humans for other humans – not really, but when reading recipes written by AI – yes, those are mostly terrible.
Hire back human editors – REAL ones, with proper education, experience editing, etc, not cheapest high school dropouts.
BTW, there is no shortage of human editors who were forced to retire due to idiotic planning.
On the sad news front, old school editors with years of experience, some fluent in more than two languages, are gradually dying out of old age. Back in the days of yore, one not only had to major in languages, but actually LEARN the culture, ie, know at least some history, etc etc. I personally knew few of those, and, sadly, there is no major that I am aware of that can cover things at that depth.
I absolutely love this. I was making similar diagrams manually for myself.
Especially when i was trying to understand how some basic foods are made. For example all the dairy products and how these are related. how milk gets turned into cream, sour cream, yoghurt, cheese, hard cheese, butter, buttermil, kefir. or maybe how rocks get turned into cement, mortar, concrete and all this things. i was calling these “tech trees”. sometimes it can give important insight for kids that were not growing on a farm and only seen the end products in their life.
That’s really cool! I’ve seen some diagrams like that for the guided evolution/cultivation of certain plants (the relationships between tomatos, potatos, and peppers, for instance), but not for different related food products.
This seems like a work in progress, and the LLM factor may make it unsustainable to justify the compute needed once they move away from burn rates to profit margins, but I could see this being great as a plugin or extra widget in something like Mealie.
I am surprised by the amount of negative reactions this elicits. This is great! Not only is it easy to understand at a glance, but it allows much easier ingestion of recipe information by small teams of amateur cooks, which is coincidentally something that we needed for our summer cooking events!
Yeah, a lot of people seemed to take my comment as a slight against reading, but I was trying to say that sometimes it’s easier to refer to a flow chart, especially when you’re right in the middle of something. Doubly so if you’re new to the recipe or the process in general.
I can read a recipe without problem, but many of the recipes available online now are full of fluff like when authors were paid by the word/line (think Alexandre Dumas). A flow chart is an interesting idea. Thanks for posting.
But – how about AI-generated hardware and AI-generated software for vintage computers? ;-)
Cool exploration
This could be useful with our new fridge that sports a large touch screen panel on its door.
I often use AI for a recipe using ingredients on hand, if a recipe can be cast to the fridge door with interactive touch , I don’t have to keep picking up my phone to glance at it repeatedly. Also could be useful for multiple cooks making a holiday meal.
Be handy if everything had an RFID tag. Make inventory easier.
Ive been toying around with using commercial food additives.
Ive found google AI very helpful in finding and incorporating different food additives to enhance flavor, improve texture, and extend shelf/freezer life.
Whenever it recommends an ingredient I havent worked with before I spend some time researching that ingredient and make sure to ask questions that challenge the initial recommendations. From time to time that extra step causes the LLM to counter its initial recommendation. But for the most part its really helped me out.
I had previously attempted and failed to use butter to enrich my rabbit sausage and it came terrible. The meat was crumbly, the butter just separated and oozed out. It was an unmitigated disaster. I tried using transglutaminase but it didnt really help. So I fed the recipe into google and asked it what food additive would work best to fix the problem. It suggested soy lecithin and helped incorporate it into my recipe. It didnt take much, didnt mess with the flavor but totally nailed the texture/consistency. Google AI warned that the butter inclusion might adversely effect the long term freezer storage. After a bit of back and forth I landed on potassium lactate and purified deodorized powdered rosemary oleoresin extract. Google Ai adjusted the soy lecithin content, recommended how much of the PL and PROE to add and scaled the whole recipe to the amount of rabbit meat I was using.
The result was a perfect bratwurst with a great flavor, texture, mouthfeel. They have tasted almost exactly the same when defrosted and cooked for the last 6 months.
I used to make rabbit nuggets (chicken nuggets with rabbit meat) from malletted chunks of rabbit meat. After my success with brats I started grinding the rabbit meat and using the same additives with a different seasoning profile to make molded reconstituted butter enriched bunnynugs, and patties that I batter coat, par fry, and freeze for later use. They are BEYOND perfect.
Again, I relied on google Ai to proportion out the recipe and generate a step by step guide to incorporating each element correctly. It really took the guesswork out. I had experimented with food additives and molecular gastronomy years ago and often found that Id either make a mess or waste a lot of ingredients through trial and error, even when there were instructions included with the products. GoogleAi does a great job of eliminating that. If I dont understand Im not rereading the same thing over and over, Im asking a question and getting an answer. When something comes out less than perfect I explain the result and issue and get an explanation of what happened and a recommendation of what to try to make it better on the next batch.
Ive been resistant to Ai/LLM. I often found them to give wrong answers in subjects I know a lot about so I assumed them to be equally flawed in subjects I do not. And there are times that it contradicts itself and/or gives me advice that I know isnt correct, but the more I use it the more Ive figured out how to reword my questions or simply to point out its mistake and make it check itself. Its less like dealing with the expert omnipotent machine of scifi and more like IMing someone that knows a lot about a lot but isnt really an expert on anything
its DMing. the kids call it a DM now a days. they also say flash foward. were old.
so… they found my ex-wife?
I like the idea! It think the best would be to have both ways to describe a recipe side-by-side – the text for the fine details, the graph to have an overview of the situation.
It reminds me of the site “Cooking for Engineers”, an old blog providing a similar diagram (in different style) at the end of each recipe.
Thanks for the review!
I was wondering why a bunch of Russians started asking it to make bombs, and now I know where they came from (you can have them back, but I’m keeping the recipes for explosives)
I’m waiting for someone to steal it and make money, then I’ll steal it back and take all their ideas and that’s how I’ll quit my day job and become self employed 🤟
To all the haters: yeah look, I’m still working on it, thanks for the tips, and yes AI sucks but this makes cooking suck less for me. If it’s not for you then don’t waste your time on it 🤙