Case Study
Building a Meal Planner App
August 2026
The brief
I wanted to explore vibe coding to solve a problem of mine -- weekly meal planning. The advancement of AI-assisted development seemed like a good time to also get exposed to other design workflows, like how product designers work together with engineers to put products together. This case study is about my exploration in learning to build while making something functional for me.
The problem
One life struggle that I want to solve is planning what to eat for the week. There are so many questions I wanted to solve. I need to pick and choose which ones mattered and which were more nice-to-have.
What can I cook right now?
What cravings do I have?
What do I need to pick up at the store?
What's easy to make and can last a week?
What data can I track about the food I eat?
The approach
I started with a Claude prompt and it immediately generated an attractive usable prototype. However, I had a few goals to fulfill in this process:
Go through the process of design work in Figma and using Claude Code to build in order to learn the pipeline
Do some rapid prototyping in order to explore different features
Finalize a feature set and optimize the user experience for them
Even with a simple initial prompt — Claude generated something that looked usable
Even with a simple initial prompt — Claude generated something that looked usable
This initial version of the recipe screen organized recipes by cuisine type while also supporting search. This pass is very text heavy since I was trying to see how regional organization would look.
The results
TBD — the work is still in progress. This page will be updated as more progress is made.