Articles
Plain-English explainers, practical how-tos, and the occasional opinion. Written by a solo dev building Surprise Chef for his own family.
Eight AIs walked into a kitchen. One of them served us chicken.
We tested eight chatbots — free, paid, signed-in, anonymous — on a single cookbook photo of San Choy Bau. One invented a chicken recipe out of thin air. One caught a bug the cookbook itself had missed for years. Here's what happened, ranked.
BYOAI: stop paying twice for AI features in apps you already use
You already pay for Claude or ChatGPT. Why is every meal-planning, productivity, and lifestyle app trying to charge you a second AI subscription on top? The MCP-first 'bring your own AI' model is a better deal for everyone except the apps doing the double-billing.
How to digitise a physical cookbook with AI (without retyping a thing)
Photograph a recipe page, get back a structured smart recipe card with mise en place, parallel cooking tracks, and built-in timers. Here's the practical how-to using Claude or ChatGPT and a free MCP app called Surprise Chef.
What is an MCP app? A plain-English guide for the rest of us
MCP (Model Context Protocol) lets AI assistants like Claude and ChatGPT plug into outside tools the way browser extensions plug into browsers. Here's what that actually means, why it matters, and what makes a good MCP app.
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