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Michael Christie
All work

Personal project

Cucina recipe app

A recipe web app and iOS app built with AI prompts, taken from a quick demo to a production-ready product.

Client
Personal project
Year
2025
Role
Designer and developer
Discipline
Product design, AI prototyping, iOS
Tools
Cursor, Vite, React, Tailwind, TypeScript, Swift
Recipe detail on desktop, with timings, difficulty and servings.

Overview

Learning to build with AI

Cucina started as an experiment in AI-assisted coding. I used prompts in Cursor to build a quick demo, then kept iterating until I had a working web app and an iOS app with the details a real product needs.

Discover and delight

Find something to cook with what you have

Craving Italian? Something healthy? Something quick? Pick a cuisine, a dietary type, a season or a cooking method, and filter by the ingredients already in your pantry.

Filters for meal type, cuisine, diet, style, season and method, plus an ingredient search.
Ingredients and method side by side, so you can cook from the screen.
Browsing results with filters applied.

iOS app

Discovery in a feed

The iOS app borrows the full-screen, swipeable feed from TikTok. One recipe fills the screen at a time, which suits browsing on a phone far better than a grid.

Recipe detail on iPhone.
The inspiration feed.
A featured recipe card.
Cuisine filters on mobile.

Made with

Vite, Tailwind, React, TypeScript and Swift.

Next steps

Automating the content

The next phase is a content pipeline that fills the app without manual entry.

  • Scrape recipes with Make or Zapier.
  • Rewrite descriptions and steps with ChatGPT.
  • Add tags and ingredients automatically.
  • Load recipes into the CMS with Selenium.
  • Generate hero and inspiration images.
The planned content automation flow.