Pesto Bot
An AI kitchen assistant for pesto lovers. Tell it what's in your pantry — classic basil and pine nuts, or kale and almonds — and it suggests personalised recipes plus pairings for pasta, pizza, and salads.
- Year
- 2026
- Role
- Solo build · 6 weeks
- Tech
- Next.js
- TypeScript
- OpenAI API
- Postgres
- Tailwind
What it is
A focused, single-purpose AI assistant for one thing: helping people make pesto with the ingredients they actually have. No 12-step onboarding, no "create an account" wall, no chat history sidebar.
The problem
Most cooking apps make you scroll past five recipe options before they tell you what to do. I wanted an assistant that:
- Took what I have as input.
- Returned one recipe, not five.
- Returned a paragraph, not a 1200-word SEO essay.
What I built
A single text box, an LLM prompt I rewrote about thirty times, and a structured response renderer that surfaces:
- A name for the variant ("Kale-Almond Pesto with Lemon")
- The ratios in a copyable block
- Three pairing suggestions
- A one-line "why this works"
That's it. No images, no nutrition tracking, no shopping list.
What I learned
The hardest part wasn't the LLM call — it was deciding what to leave out. Every iteration of the spec ended with me cutting features. The final cut is the one where my partner used it for the first time without me explaining anything.