A SwiftUI iOS app that decides dinner for you. It matches dishes to what's already in the kitchen, picks one for you when nobody can decide, and walks you through it one tappable step at a time.
PickDish didn't start as a product idea. It started as a recurring argument at home, and a second annoyance that showed up every time I actually cooked.
My mother, my partner, and I would go back and forth most evenings with no real answer, and more than once that back-and-forth turned into an actual disagreement. We had plenty of food at home; we just couldn't decide what to do with it.
Once I did know what to make, following a recipe video meant pausing and replaying it with messy hands, over and over. It worked, but it wasn't something I'd call enjoyable. It felt like a chore layered on top of a chore.
Each one came directly from how we actually behave at home, not from a generic "recipe app" template.
Instead of starting from a recipe and sending you shopping, PickDish starts from what's already in the kitchen and works backward to a dish, which is closer to how my mother actually cooks than any recipe app I'd used.
Tap “Pick something for me” and PickDish lands on one dish, leaning on the time of day (breakfast, lunch, merienda or dinner) and skipping anything you’ve said you avoid. Not feeling it? Swipe the card for another. The decision goes away instead of just getting faster.
Type “sibuyas” and you get Onion; “kalabasa” gets you Squash. Tagalog names, regional aliases and common misspellings were in the ingredient vocabulary from day one, so searching feels native to a Filipino kitchen instead of translated for one.
Recipes break down into short steps you tap to mark complete as you go. It's a small bit of game-like feedback that replaces fumbling with video playback, so the phone stays out of the way while you actually cook.
I designed the product and interaction model myself, then built it end to end in SwiftUI, vibecoding the implementation with Claude Code so one person could move from idea to a working app in about four weeks.
It's a personal project outside my day job, which meant no team and no timeline but my own. The tradeoff was speed and total ownership over every decision, design and code alike.
PickDish is at MVP1 and headed for the App Store, so it can reach other people who've had the exact same "what are we eating" conversation at home. At our own table, it's already done its job: we have an answer most nights, and we're cooking from what's in the kitchen more often than before.