All work
Painted scene - a kitchen table on Thursday night, phone glowing

02 · 2025 · Product & automation

autoPlan

An automated meal-planning loop: an AI drafts the week, the household votes on Telegram, and the grocery carts build themselves.

Live - in production

Solo build

Runs every Thursday

Overview

Pick, vet, cook, repeat - with the household involved, but without a weekly meeting about it.

Every Thursday, an AI agent reads the recipe library, picks a balanced week, and posts it to the household Telegram group. Everyone votes with one tap - approve, swap, or veto - the plan locks in, and a cart-builder agent builds the multi-store Instacart carts. The only human input is a thumb.

The build, in four parts

01 - 04

01 - The problem

The weekly dinner question.

Every household deals with it: what to eat next week, who's shopping, what's already in the fridge. It's usually an hour of back-and-forth that rarely produces a plan lasting past Monday - low stakes, high friction, and a good fit for automation.

02 - The approach

One tap instead of a meeting.

Instead of asking the household to plan, autoPlan asks them to react. An AI agent drafts a preference-aware week from the recipe library and drops it into the group chat everyone already uses. Approve keeps it, swap rerolls a night, veto removes a dish for good. The plan settles in a few taps.

03 - The build

Built from cheap, boring parts.

The planning agent runs on a weekly schedule and talks to the household through a Telegram bot that polls for votes. Supabase is the single source of truth - recipes, preferences, cook history, and proposals all live there, and every consumer reads it directly. Once the plan locks, a cart-builder agent logs into Instacart with Playwright and builds carts split across the household's regular stores, then hands back per-store totals for a final review. The AI never places an order - it only gets the carts ready.

There are no servers to maintain. The agent runs on a schedule, the bot polls instead of holding a webhook, and the data layer is a managed Postgres on a free tier.

draftvotelockcartevery Thursday6:00 pm · unattendedAI drafts a balanced weekone tap · Telegramthe plan settlescarts build on Instacartsystem memoryrecipe librarypreferencescook history
The loop - draft, vote, lock, cart - running once a week on its own.

04 - The outcome

It runs on its own now.

The loop runs unattended every week. The recipe library, preferences, and cook history are its memory, so the drafts get better and the vetoes get rarer. The negotiation didn't get faster - it went away.

~60 min

of weekly planning, gone

1 tap

from draft to a filled grocery cart

5 stores

split and totaled, ready to review

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