Checked Out

Shipped the next piece of the prompt rework — this one’s about what happens when a rule actually gets broken, not just stated. Before this, a lot of the household-rules logic only ever flagged a problem after the fact — “heads up, this meal doesn’t work for Lee” — rather than fixing it. And swapping a single meal was held to a noticeably weaker standard than the full weekly plan: things the main planner would catch and repair, swap would just... let through. Three real changes: Dietary rules (allergies, dislikes, restrictions) now actually repair the plan instead of only labeling the problem, in the cases that matter most — when someone would otherwise have nothing they can eat. Swapping a single meal now gets the same treatment as generating the whole week — custom rules, variety checks, health guidance, all of it. It used to skip most of that. A restriction warning used to be able to go stale — describing a meal that had already been swapped to something else. Fixed, in both the main planner and swap. Also chased down the reason swap kept failing outright during a heavy testing session — turned out to be a too-tight token limit truncating the model’s response mid-JSON on anything with a few dietary accommodations stacked up. Easy fix once I actually found it; took a few wrong turns first (retrying, fixing the error popup) before landing on the real cause.

Shipped an update this week aimed at a different problem than the per-person diet stuff — variety. Users (including my own household) kept landing in a rut: same handful of dinners on repeat, even with a full recipe pool to draw from. Two real changes: - You can now tell it what a specific week needs, in plain language — "2 crockpot meals," "something quick 3 nights," "go big on Saturday" — and it actually holds to that instead of just gesturing at it. - The underlying prompt used to be mostly "don't repeat this" rules. It now describes what a good week actually looks like — real spread across cooking styles and formats, plus at least one dish worth looking forward to. Already found the next bug from using it myself: asked for 2 crockpot meals, got 1. Filed it, building the harder guaranteed version next. Still shipping based on how we actually use it, not a roadmap I wrote in advance.

The weekly meal-planning prompt now has a positive definition of a good week (genuine spread of cooking technique, format, and register, plus at least one dish worth looking forward to) instead of only a list of things to avoid. Also removed a rule that capped new recipes at one per week — it was a direct cause of the "I'm in a rut" complaint that started this whole effort back in v2.12.0.

We are working hard to improve and harden the results from the AI engine for better variety, more exciting meals, clearer cooking instructions and more. We are about 1/2 way through this effort and just released some major improvements: - Recipe steps now correctly walk through each person's dietary needs when a meal has an accommodation for them. - Swapping a meal now warns you if the new meal doesn't leave everyone with something they can eat. - Fixed an issue where an unrelated note could incorrectly mark a dietary need as already handled. - Behind-the-scenes reliability improvements.