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Comment by edu | Hacker News Reader

Curious, why it was easier to use an LLM vs a non-AI app with a DB of foods?

Seems that in this case a traditional approach would be more precise and more environmentally efficient to get to the same results.

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Any app I have used before has asked me to look up the foods and add them manually and usually there has been ads or subscriptions involved.

Much easier for me to take pictures of the packets while making the food, the weight the final bulk product and then when I eat just weight the plate and say “500g of casserole” and the LLM spits out the calories and keeps track of the daily consumption

Nice. I vibe coded a similar kind of system, you can dump a recipe into the chat window and it will use tool-calling to lookup macros for any foods it doesn't have in the DB and put them in, estimate raw -> cooked changes in nutrition and weight (if needed), estimate total weight of the cooked product, and macros per gram (e.g. writes a 100 gram serving to the db, you can scale it up and down and it scales the macros linearly). Similar to you I have used this app to alter my macro mix from high-fat to high-carb (for workout performance) and cut my sodium from ~4g/day to ~2.4g/day by interrogating the DB about what foods I should eat more and less of. Found some surprising wins in my habitual diet that were easy to change to hit my health targets, and looking up and logging these things by hand without LLM assistance would have been too tedious and time-consuming for me to continue to do it for as long as I have been (maybe 3 months now)

Curious, what model are you using? I have found Qwen Flash to be really great for this - tool calling works well, it's smart enough, and very cheap.

Are you giving the LLM the weights of the ingredients as you go? Sounds like a great system.

The data entry is a pain in the ass with those apps when cooking food from scratch. It’s much much easier with LLMs and natural language and voice mode and pictures of a food scale and things like that.

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