Cookidex

Point Cookidex at any delicious meal and instantly learn how to recreate it. Ingredients, steps, and nutrition included. Transform recipes to vegan, healthy, or fusion variants. Level up as you cook.

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Hi, I'm Nabil Alouani—The Bald Prompter to those who follow my Substack. I love writing (prompts), long walks, food, and my fiancée (in the reverse order, of course). So it's only natural that the idea for Cookidex came to me while strolling down the Champs-Élysées, wondering why I couldn't just point my phone at a delicious meal and instantly know how to recreate it.

I'd tried building Cookidex before. Multiple iterations, multiple failures. But when the Bolt.new World Hackathon was announced, I saw it as a divine sign to get fucking building.

Early June rolled around, right after moving to a new house (lost a couple of days there), and I dove in headfirst. This was my first time ever working with Expo, and holy shit was it intense. The learning curve wasn't just steep—it was vertical.

But here's where it gets wild: 100% of Cookidex was coded in "English". I built 80% by prompting on Bolt.new, with the remaining 20% coming from intense discuss mode sessions with Claude 4. Over 1000 prompts written, from simple one-liners to the most sophisticated instructions I've ever crafted.

The complexity nearly broke me. I almost gave up during the last week of June—display issues, Stripe integration nightmares, and don't get me started on Supabase. I redesigned the database schema 12 times—in my head, in my notebook, on the dashboard.

Then my fiancée dropped some wisdom that changed everything: "Look, do everything you can. Then you'll see."

So I did just that.

The last two days of the hackathon? I barely slept. Wrestling with production deployments, fixing responsive design issues, ensuring the AI could handle any food photo thrown at it. This wasn't just coding—it was the most ENERGIZING thing I've ever done.

Today, I'm submitting the web version of Cookidex—fully functional, AI-powered, and ready to transform how people discover and collect recipes. No, it's not perfect. There are designs I love and others that are still clumsy. But I'm super proud.

This hackathon didn't just help me build an app. It helped me evolve as a person, discover hidden aspects of myself, and develop new skills.

Thank you, Bolt.new, for creating the world's craziest and most amazing hackathon ever. You've shown me that the future of development isn't about memorizing syntax—it's about having great ideas and knowing how to communicate them.

The journey continues. I'll be building Cookidex on stream as soon as I recover from these sleepless nights. Because when you find something this fun, you don't stop.

Cheers.

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