This is about AI

Everyone is writing about AI. I guess I am too.

I've been looking for a place to document my adventures with AI. I've written this about a dozen different ways. It all felt like noise in a noisy space. But what the hell - maybe it'll be useful to someone.

I got hooked on OpenClaw about a month and a half ago. It wasn't until a few weeks into it that I realized my executive functioning was working so much better than it usually does. Is it because I offloaded a bunch of it to the robots? Maybe. Is it placebo? Probably that, too. Whatever it is, I'll take it. I haven't felt this organized in years. I'm not particularly into all the AI-is-going-to-eat-the-world hype. But if it means I'm not panic-ordering Doordash at 5:30PM every night because I can't figure out what to do about dinner, I'm here for my new robot companions.

This edition: Meal planning.

I can cook. That's never been the problem. I used to excuse not cooking as "why am I going to bother if it's just for me?" But now with Leo, that's not really a valid excuse and I want to be putting more healthful things on the table. I actually love to cook. What I don't love is needing to figure out 4 meals a day, every day, for the next ~18 years. Not to mention I'm a pretty (very...) picky eater and an even pickier cook. I absolutely refuse to touch raw meat, even though I don't mind eating it in some forms. The amount of nuance to my eating preferences is enough to make you give up trying to feed me by the 4th bullet point. I'm trying my hardest not to pass this along to Leo. Every meal is an exercise in threading the needle between what I want him to eat, what I'll actually eat, what I have on-hand, what time I have available, and probably 5 other variable factors depending on the day.

Leo needs a packed school lunch every day. He also needs a packed snack. Tuesdays he has gymnastics and there's no time to cook. Fridays are pizza. A protein I cook on Sunday can't show up again past Tuesday. I don't want either of us eating the same meal twice in a row. I need to eat something other than a handful of pretzels or goldfish for lunch. And then there's the long list of foods that never appear in my kitchen, including meat with bones, mushrooms, and eggplants.

From the dawn of my use of AI, my first ever use case was meal planning. I knew exactly what I wanted a system to do. The rules were clear in my head. But I could never find a system that worked once I got it out of my head. I've tried to set this up before, and it never stuck, because every version still waited on me to start it. And see previous executive functioning comment. I was never going to remember to start it.

Then came Claude's Routines (which is now Scheduled tasks). Then came OpenClaw. Once I had an agent that could run the plan on a schedule, and the week's meals and the grocery list started arriving without me asking, and the whole system finally came together.

My meal planning system is 4 files: Preferences, Inventory, Shopping list, Skill.

Preferences: This is where every constraint lives. They're specific to the point of being almost absurd. A sampling:

Pantry: A running snapshot of what's in my kitchen right now, freezer and dry goods included.

Shopping list: Organized by store.

The Skill: the instructions that read the other three, turn them into a week of meals, and spit it out in my preferred format.

5th Bonus File: "keeper" recipes and favorites. Links or other notes for things I make often or I've liked. It pulls from this but isn't limited to this.

Every week, on Sunday, OpenClaw triggers the skill to plan. It reads the rules, checks what I already have, and builds the week around the food in the house. Then it writes the shopping list. It also checks my calendar and the weather to make sure it's proposing seasonal, weather-appropriate options and works around any events. If it's nice out, I'm grilling. If there's an event on a given night around dinner time, it'll flag that and propose something quick or a meal from my freezer stash.

Every Sunday, without my asking, next week's plan lands as its own dated file and the shopping list updates to match. Each day has Leo's breakfast, his packed lunch built from the night before, a backpack-safe snack, my own ten-minute lunch, and dinner. Friday says pizza for dinner. There's one thing to batch-cook on the weekend, and the groceries are grouped by where I buy them.

And if there's something I likely wouldn't know how to make, a brief recipe is included at the bottom.

My version runs through an OpenClaw agent I keep running in the background, so all of this happens on a schedule instead of waiting on me. This could run just as well on a Claude scheduled task. If you're capable of doing it without a scheduler, then you could also just throw the files and prompt into regular Claude Chat, ChatGPT, or Gemini, and get what you need. My OpenClaw agents sends the output to Telegram, where I go back and forth with my agent to refine it.

While the skill is pretty good at this point, there's still things it flakes on. And I don't follow it to a tee. But having the baseline there as a backup plan is immensely helpful. I have a second automation that runs every evening that checks in on what we actually ate so it can track the plan vs deviations from the plan as well as keep my inventory up to date. Obviously it's not perfect at maintaining inventory. Be sure to remind it of its rules, and tell it occasionally to review the conversation and write back any rules/preferences/findings that it hadn't previously captured. Make it learn. Make it work for you.

I completely rely on being "interviewed" by the AI to get the details I might not think of into my skills and files. The bootstrap files will run an interview for you. Or you can just braindump off the top of your head. I highly recommend Wispr Flow (referral link) for the interview process. Speaking freely works much better than writing it all out, IMO. From there, you can decide how it runs: paste them in each week, or, if you use Claude with skills, let a scheduled task do it for you.

I put together a little bootstrap setup if you'd like this for yourself. Have at it, and make it your own. I'd love to hear if you make any cool modifications!