[apsurd]

How do you trust the recipe without context?

People say they want one thing but then their actions and money go to another.

I do agree there's unnecessary fluff. But "just give me the recipe" isn't really what people want. And I don't think your represent some outlier take because really have you ever gotten a recipe exactly as you outlined — zero context – and gave a damn to make it?

[T0Bi]

The biggest cooking / recipe app in Germany (Chefkoch) works perfectly fine for millions of people without any of the fluff. It's a list of ingredients and cooking steps, that's it. I don't know a single person that cooks who doesn't use it regularly.

[lan321]

> How do you trust the recipe without context?

Ratings or poster reputation.

I often use recipes from a particular chef's website, which are formulated with specific ingredients, steps, and, optionally, a video. I trust the chef since I've yet to try a bad recipe from him.

I also often use baking recipes from King Arthur based on ratings. They're also pretty consistently good and don't have much fluff.

[apsurd]

Those are good examples. A trusted chef's website can list purely the recipe because it's held within a pre-vetted context. I do this as well.

I'm advocating for the need for those kinds of trust signals. If AI literally just listed ingredients, I wouldn't trust it. How could I?

[Brendinooo]

> But "just give me the recipe" isn't really what people want.

The structure of recipe sites has less to do with revealed preferences and more to do with playing the SEO game.

[marssaxman]

> How do you trust the recipe without context?

Well, I just read it. The stakes are not that high!

> have you ever gotten a recipe exactly as you outlined — zero context – and gave a damn to make it?

Of course: there are a great many useful cookbooks written exactly this way.

[apsurd]

The book is the context! It was published, it has a presumably influential vetted author.

Maybe I am coming off too flippant. I'm just trying to say there's a spectrum between fluff and context. If the AI's literally just gave us answers and list of recipes, it wouldn't be as useful as with the context backing up where it came from, why this list, and so on.

[marssaxman]

Well, that's a reasonable point!

Perhaps it also depends on one's approach to cooking. I often read recipes not because I intend to follow them, but to understand the range of variation in the dish before I make my own version. "Somebody liked this enough to bother writing it up" is enough context for that use.

[aniviacat]

Yesterday I baked some muffins from an internet recipe that had a list of ingredients and four sentences on what to do. They're pretty nice.