Cookify: Turning a Broken Prototype into a Real AI Recipe App

This is a submission for the GitHub Finish-Up-A-Thon Challenge

What I Built

I rebuilt Cookify from an abandoned side project into a complete AI-powered recipe workspace — one that takes whatever ingredients you actually have in your kitchen and returns a real, structured, step-by-step recipe personalized to your dietary preference, complete with a dish photo and a downloadable PDF.

The original was a basic React prototype. It had a static ingredient list and a "Generate" button that called the Gemini API — but with no authentication, no persistence, no structure to the AI output, and no error handling. The recipe text came back as a raw unformatted string. There was no way to revisit what you'd made. It was a demo, not a product.

The current version is a Next.js App Router application built around a deliberate, end-to-end flow: login → select diet → pick ingredients → generate → save → manage.