So, I read a post by Matt Shumer. His post gave me a lot of anxiety about the future of the design profession and what to expect in the upcoming years with all office jobs. Basically, how AI is currently able to outperform us as designers. As a Junior Designer, who already has limited knowledge, this is scary.
Instead of focusing on the negative, I chose to flip the narrative and use these systems.
This is my first time using AI to develop an app for myself, and I was impressed.
Prompt
I used the free version of Base 44 to create an application up until I needed to buy the remaining credits.
View the website here
My Initial prompt: Can you build me a recipe generator app? I want a section to include what I have in my fridge. I want it to help plan healthy meals for the week and create a shopping list for those meals, therefore, use similar enough ingredients. I want to ensure that it uses all types of cuisines.
This is how it responded:
I’ll build a comprehensive recipe generator app with fridge inventory, weekly meal planning, and smart shopping lists. Here’s my plan:
Key Features:
- Fridge Inventory – Add/manage ingredients you have on hand
- Weekly Meal Planner – AI-generated healthy meals across diverse cuisines, prioritizing your fridge items
- Recipe Details – Full recipes with instructions
- Smart Shopping List – Auto-generated from meal plan, minus what’s already in your fridge
Design: Warm, elegant palette — soft cream background, rich greens and terracotta accents, clean typography, card-based layout with smooth animations.
Structure:
- Entities: FridgeItem, MealPlan, ShoppingItem
- Pages: Fridge, MealPlanner, ShoppingList
- Layout with sidebar navigation
Let me build this now.
Now I’ll build the UI — a sleek, modern recipe generator with four main sections: Fridge Inventory, Meal Plan Generator, Weekly Meal View, and Shopping List.
Your MealCraft app is ready — it has three tabs: My Fridge (add what you have), Meal Plan (AI generates a diverse weekly plan using your fridge items with overlapping ingredients across cuisines), and Shopping List (auto-generated, only items you need to buy, with checkboxes). Hit “Generate Plan” to create your first week of meals!
Result
Things that positively surprised me:
1. The addition of useful features: It recommended and added features I did not mention, however, that were very useful, such as Tags (Meal Prep Friendly) (Time)(High Protein), Expiration date on food. Adding details, including ingredients and how to prepare the food on the main section so you can quickly view the recipes.
2. The Speed, Less than 2 minutes later, there was a working prototype. It is impressive how quickly it can code and develop something that works.
3. The simple UI, although I don’t believe the platform follows the UI they describe in terms of visual style. The style they choose to use has clear signals to the user, while hiding some information such as the details of the recipes to reduce cognitive load. The numbers on the side of my fridge and shopping list are clear indicators. Details such as these are helpful reminders to Junior Designers, and should be seen as a way to improve.
Things that could improve:
1. The UI, The UI did not align with their description; it seems that this is something that requires more iterations.
2. Technical requirements: The recipe ingredients are not transferred in the shopping list.
3. Details, I asked it to add a flag of the country that the food represents; however, it seems to not be able to do this.
Did Base44 accomplish what I told it to?
Technically, no, the whole point of the application is for the recipe generation to be connected to the supermarket list, therefore let the user know what to buy.
However, it did succeed in creating a good starting point for what an application could look like, including additional useful features.
Overall, this experience was eye-opening. I understand how useful AI can be to help develop ideas into digital products.
This was a very quick 30-minute session, just to see what the free version can do. I might decide to invest in the paid version.
How do you use AI in your work?
Elin Wahlqvist 
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