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Comment by aerhardt | Hacker News Reader

Well, your example is timely.

Today I asked ChatGPT to make me a weekly calorie plan and it was perfect. But then I still use MyFitnessPal to log my calories because their food database is outstanding, and the UX of scanning food barcodes is unbeatable. They have the most niche items in my country, Spain.

How are LLMs going any of that? An app is often much more than a CRUD interface.

Maybe I could build a custom app that scans the nutrition facts table and with voice I could explain how much I ate or something - I’m technical, but really, I have better things to do and I’d rather pay MFP 10 bucks a month.

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The data sources often exist to build these things yourself. For your example there is Open Food Facts and USDA FoodData Central.

https://world.openfoodfacts.org/

https://fdc.nal.usda.gov/

Both would make a great foundation for this sort of app. OFF is crowdsourced and does include barcode information. I have no idea how robust the dataset is for your geography though. If I were to build something like this for personal use, I'd be looking at a PWA that can leverage the camera for barcode scanning. I'd work with the existing crowd sourced database as well as provide a mechanism for "manual" entry which should just be scanning a barcode and taking a picture of the nutrition information. I've personally built systems like this before and all of these things are well within the capability of most SOTA LLM to build out.

I am not going to even try until it becomes a literal weekend project with zero maintenance and perfect reliability. Maintenance is crucial - I would not want to become the maintainer of two dozen apps that are genuinely useful to me. At 10€ a month the economics are not there. Even researching if the codebar database has perfect coverage in Spain like MFP sounds like more time than I would like to invest. I have a thousand other projects I’d like to build.

> An app is often much more than a CRUD interface. "I could have written Facebook over a weekend" syndrome :)

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