Save Cooking - built with CC

I started this project over the holidays after getting dragged into my usual round of parental tech support.

My parents still use MasterCook for their recipes. It’s getting discontinued and shut down, so they needed a way to migrate everything somewhere new. The app everyone recommended — Cook'n — was shockingly bad. Buggy, slow, borderline unusable.

At some point I thought: I could build something better in a weekend.

So I fired up Claude Code and had a working app in about a day — including support for importing MasterCook files and migrating their entire recipe library. I kept going just to see how far I could push it, and three weeks later it’s turned into a full product: Save.Cooking.

Stack is:

• Next.js frontend

• Python backend

• A suite of CLI tools for admin, analytics, and ops

• deployed on fly.io

The CLI tools run inside Claude Code so I can manage production intelligently without giving the model direct database access. That part has been especially interesting.

I’ve now hit the scale limits where Claude starts losing some long-term project context, but the velocity is still wild. Last week I read a post about serving Markdown versions of pages to help AI crawlers understand site context. From reading → implementing → deploying took under four minutes.

The pace of building right now is unreal.