Family Dinners

Weekly meal planner that asks Claude to design a full week of dinners — main + vegetable side, with full recipes, shopping list, and feedback handling. React frontend, Express + Anthropic SDK backend, Docker for deployment, optional Todoist sync so the shopping list goes with you to the store.

What it does

• Generates a 6-day plan (Sun–Thu mains, Fri leftovers) — each day has a main + a vegetable side that runs in parallel.
• Respects family constraints — time caps per night, picky kid, weekly themes (Tuesday tacos, Wednesday international rotation, Thursday noodles).
• Pantry-aware — prefers meals that use what's already on hand.
• Learns over time — rate each meal (loved / ok / too-complicated / don't repeat) and leave free-text notes. The planner reads recent notes when picking next week's meals.
• Single-day swap with reason — replace one day; the reason you type ("too spicy for the kid", "want something quicker") drives the model's new pick.
• Editable recipes — view + edit full ingredients/steps for both main and side.
• Shopping list — auto-generated, deduped across days, with optional Send to Todoist so it syncs to your phone.
• Weekly cron — macOS LaunchAgent auto-generates the new week every Monday at 8am.
• Week history — every generated week is kept. Use the picker in the header to flip between past weeks; their meals, recipes, and shopping lists are preserved. Past weeks are read-only for plan changes but you can still leave feedback/notes (useful for recording how a meal actually went).

Architecture

backend/         Express + Anthropic SDK. REST API + serves the built React app.
frontend/        Vite + React. Tabs for the week, shopping list, pantry, prefs.
data/            pantry.json, history.json, preferences.json — bind-mounted into the container.
launchd/         macOS LaunchAgent that runs the weekly planner inside the container.
Dockerfile       Multi-stage: builds the React app, installs backend prod deps, runs Node.

The container exposes port 3001 and serves both /api/* (the backend) and the static React app from the same Express process.

Setup

1. Add your Anthropic API key

cp .env.example .env
# edit .env and paste your ANTHROPIC_API_KEY

Get a key at https://console.anthropic.com/.

2. Start the container

docker compose up -d --build

Open http://localhost:3001 on your Mac. Family devices on the same Wi-Fi can use http://<your-mac-hostname>.local:3001 (e.g. http://henrys-mbp.local:3001).

If you don't know your hostname:

scutil --get LocalHostName

3. (Optional) Schedule the weekly auto-generate

./launchd/install.sh

This installs a LaunchAgent that runs the planner inside the container every Monday at 8 AM. It writes the new plan to data/history.json, which the React app picks up on next refresh.

Manually trigger anytime:

launchctl kickstart -k gui/$(id -u)/com.henry.dinners.weekly

Logs: logs/cron.out.log and logs/cron.err.log.

Day-to-day

• Open the app → see this week's plan and shopping list.
• Feedback button on a meal → opens a modal with a rating (loved / ok / too-complicated / don't repeat) and free-text notes. The rating auto-updates preferences.json; the notes get passed into the next plan's prompt so Claude can act on things like "kid loved the broccoli" or "took 70 min, not 40".
• Swap… button → opens a small modal asking what should change about that day. Your typed reason is sent verbatim to the model, which replaces just that one day (respecting time caps, the other days' picks, and any prior feedback).
• Recipe button → view + edit the full recipe (ingredients, steps, notes). Edits save into history.json.
• Pantry / Preferences tabs → edit what's on hand and family quirks; future plans take these into account.
• Send to Todoist (on the Shopping tab) → pushes "Buy this week" + "Check stock" into a Groceries project, with a new section per week. Sync handles the rest — open Todoist on your phone at the store. Requires TODOIST_API_TOKEN in .env (token at https://app.todoist.com/app/settings/integrations/developer). The project name is configurable via TODOIST_PROJECT_NAME (defaults to "Groceries"); it's created on first push if it doesn't exist.

API quick reference

Method	Path	Purpose
GET	/api/state	Pantry, history, preferences, currentPlan, weekOf
POST	/api/plan/generate	Generate this week's plan (body: { instruction? })
POST	/api/plan/swap	Swap one day on the current week (body: { day, reason?, weekOf? }; weekOf defaults to latest but must equal the calendar's current week)
POST	/api/plan/feedback	Record feedback for any week (body: { day, rating?, notes?, weekOf? } — at least one of rating or notes required; weekOf defaults to latest)
PUT	/api/plan/recipe	Save an edited recipe (body: { day, meal, weekOf? }; weekOf defaults to latest)
POST	/api/shopping/push-to-todoist	Push the selected week's shopping list to Todoist as a new section under TODOIST_PROJECT_NAME (body: { weekOf? }; defaults to latest)
GET/PUT	/api/pantry	Read/replace pantry items
GET/PUT	/api/preferences	Read/replace likes, dislikes, notes

Local development (without Docker)

# terminal 1 — backend
cd backend && ANTHROPIC_API_KEY=sk-ant-... DATA_DIR=../data npm run dev

# terminal 2 — frontend
cd frontend && npm run dev
# open http://localhost:5173

The Vite dev server proxies /api/* to http://localhost:3001.

Data files

All state lives in data/. Safe to back up, edit by hand, or commit (excluding preferences.json if it contains anything you'd rather not share).

• pantry.json — { "items": ["Mushrooms", ...] }
• preferences.json — { "liked": [...], "disliked": [...], "notes": "..." }
• history.json — { "weeks": [{ "weekOf", "meals", "shopping", "feedback" }, ...] }

Cost

Each weekly generation is a single Claude call (~3–5k output tokens) plus optional swaps. On Sonnet 4.6 a full week costs roughly a few cents.