Why I built it
I realized one of the hardest parts of cooking is remembering what to buy. Recipes online are a mess: buried in blog posts, inconsistently formatted, never quite ready for a grocery run. I made CookPrep for myself first, and I've been using it for months.
What it does
Paste a recipe link, food blog, or YouTube cooking video, and CookPrep AI pulls out the ingredients into a clean grocery list. At the store, I open that list instead of scrolling through the recipe again in the produce aisle.
How it works
It's a free iPhone app on the App Store. The backend is hosted on DigitalOcean, and the LLM inference runs on DigitalOcean Serverless Inference, so I can switch between models through a simple API.
Design principle
Reduce friction between inspiration and execution. The win isn't a clever model. It's fewer open tabs and one list I actually trust.