Productivity · Blog · 🇬🇧 United Kingdom
Building a Timing App for Cooking Several Recipes at Once
Simon Willison asked Claude for an app to coordinate timings when preparing two recipes at the same time.
- Profession
- Home Cook
- Tools
- Claude
- Source
- simonwillison.net ↗
- Country
- 🇬🇧 United Kingdom
- Report date
- December 23, 2025
- Verified on
- October 24, 2026
What they did
It generated a prep timeline app based on the recipes.
How it went
The account gives no numbers.
Good to know
Check meat cooking times for food safety.
The prompt
Here are the recipes [texts]. I want to serve at [time]. Build a single timeline showing what to start and when, plus an HTML app with timers for each step.
Replace what is in [brackets]. Prompt written by us from the account, not a literal copy of the source. Do not paste other people’s personal data (privacy laws such as LGPD and GDPR apply).
Summary in our own words. Results as stated in the original account; we have not tested or audited them. Read the source ↗ Found a mistake?
Similar cases
01One week to find an apartment in San Francisco
A new hire used Claude and ChatGPT to list property managers and filter listings by price and area.
02A 5-day meal plan that becomes a grocery cart
With the Instacart plugin, the author asked for a plan with no fish or pork and got the list already in the cart.
03Turning saved Instagram posts into a recipe book
A user asked Meta's agent to find all her saved recipes and organize them by type.
04Building a "thinking system" with Obsidian and Claude
A developer started recording what he learns in Obsidian and using Claude to connect notes.
05Sending AI summaries and research straight to your Kindle
A developer built a Go MCP in minutes that lets Claude or Codex send texts to a Kindle.
06A Recipe from Whatever Is Left in the Fridge
A college student asks ChatGPT for recipes using the ingredients he has at home, adjusted to his taste.
07Claude doubled the speed of a home Wi-Fi network
A user asked for help with slow internet; the agent ran tests, read the Mac's signal data and walked them through the router settings.
08Product manager turns scattered notes into a priority list
Ron Forbes dumps meeting notes into a folder and Claude Code returns summaries and tasks sorted by priority.