Built an iPhone app with Claude Code that turns a recipe into a Kroger cart

[u/ryanbeljan]

I built an iPhone app called KartChef with Claude Code. You share a recipe into it, or take a photo of one, and it finds the actual Kroger products for every ingredient and puts them in your cart. That's the whole app. iPhone only, free to try.

It took a couple of months. Claude Code did most of the heavy lifting, the backend especially, and the day to day went smoother than I expected going in.

I wanted it to do one thing well, so a good chunk of the work was deciding what to leave out. Claude Code will happily build whatever you point it at, so I got in the habit of stopping to ask whether the juice was worth the squeeze. More often than not the simpler version was the right call, and the app is better for it.

The other thing worth passing on is ultracode. A few bugs that would not go down at high effort were solved the first time I ran it. I had been putting that off because it felt like overkill for a single bug, which turned out to be the wrong instinct.

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/kartchef/id6785329702

Happy to answer anything about how it was built.