Mise (fictional demo app) · Feature review · Round 1

Cook mode, and what the recipe list should do while you're standing at the stove

Three proposals for the next phase, each drawn as the app today next to the app proposed. Pick a stance on each, write whatever you're thinking in the box — it saves as you type, so you can close this and come back. When you're done, hit Save notes for Claude at the bottom and tell Claude "done".

This is a demo page. "Mise" is a made-up recipe app invented to show the shape of a design-review artifact. Click around — the stance buttons and the note boxes are live and save to your own browser, nothing is sent anywhere. Save notes for Claude only works when the page is published as a Claude artifact, so on this hosted copy use Copy instead; it puts the same markdown on your clipboard.
The lines this review doesn't cross

Guardrails, stated up front

From the project's DESIGN.md. If a wireframe below seems to break one of these, that's a bug in the wireframe — flag it in the notes.

✓
Everything works offlinethe kitchen has bad wifi; no screen may block on a fetch
✓
No accounts, no synclocal storage only until v2 — nothing here may assume a server
✓
One accent colourthe ink/paper palette is fixed; new surfaces reuse it
✓
Nothing auto-deletesa recipe leaves the list only when the user says so
E1 · Size M · No schema change · ships first

E1 · A cook mode you can read from two feet away

Split the recipe into one step per screen, with the screen kept awake.

"I keep losing my place and my hands are covered in flour." — you, last session

Recommend it, and recommend it first. Today the whole recipe is one scrolling page at body-text size: finding your place after a scroll means re-reading, and the screen dims mid-simmer. One step per screen at 15pt solves both, and it's additive — the existing recipe view stays exactly as it is for reading on the couch.

  • Step-per-screen, not a bigger font. Enlarging the existing list would push a four-step recipe to three screens of scrolling. The problem isn't size alone, it's that nothing marks where you are.
  • Ingredients repeat on every step. Only the ones that step uses. This is the single thing that stops the back-and-forth to the top of the page.
  • Keep-awake is scoped to cook mode. Entering sets it, leaving clears it, and a banner says so — a screen that silently never sleeps is a battery bug the user can't diagnose.
  • Deviation flag. DESIGN.md says every screen is reachable from the tab bar. Cook mode isn't — it's modal, entered from a recipe and exited back to it. Flagging it rather than quietly breaking the rule.
Today — recipe detail, scrolling
Weeknight ragù
45 min · serves 4 · saved 12 Mar
Ingredients
400g tinned tomatoes · 1 onion · 2 cloves garlic · 300g mince · 1 carrot · olive oil · salt
Method
Dice the onion and carrot fine. Warm oil in a wide pan over medium heat.
Soften the onion and carrot 8 min until translucent, not coloured.
Add garlic, cook 1 min, then the mince. Break it up and brown it.
Tomatoes in, half a tin of water, simmer 30 min uncovered.
Season, and check again just before you serve it.
RecipesShoppingSettings
Five steps at 9pt, no marker for where you are, and the screen dims after 30s.
Proposed — cook mode, step 3 of 5
Screen stays awake while cook mode is open
STEP 3 OF 5
Add garlic, cook 1 min, then the mince. Break it up and brown it.
only this step's items
2 cloves garlic, sliced
300g mince
the softened onion & carrot
Back
Next step
one step, one screen — 15pt, the ingredients for this step only, and an explicit awake banner.
Your call
E2 · Size S · No schema change · independent of E1

E2 · Stop sorting the list by the day you saved it

Group the recipe list by course, keep newest-first inside each group.

"By the time I have 40 of these I'll never find the soup." — you, two sessions ago

Recommend it, with one reservation. Save-date ordering is only useful for the handful you added this week; past about twenty recipes it becomes a scroll hunt. Course grouping matches how you actually decide ("what am I making for dinner"). The reservation: it needs a course on every recipe, and the eleven already saved don't have one.

  • Course, not cuisine or tag. Cuisine splits too fine on a small library — you'd get seven groups of one. Course gives four or five real groups.
  • Recently saved stays reachable. It becomes a segmented filter at the top rather than the default order, so nothing that works today gets worse.
  • The eleven existing recipes need backfilling. Proposal: default them all to "Mains" and let you re-file from the row. No migration, no schema change — the field already exists and is nullable.
  • Open question, genuinely. Should an unfiled recipe get its own "Unsorted" group at the top, or silently sit in Mains? The wireframe shows Unsorted.
Today — flat list, newest first
Recipes
11 saved
Weeknight ragù
saved 12 Mar · 45 min
Leek and potato soup
saved 9 Mar · 30 min
Buttermilk pancakes
saved 2 Mar · 20 min
Roast chicken, one pan
saved 27 Feb · 1 hr 20
Olive oil cake
saved 21 Feb · 55 min
Chickpea stew
saved 14 Feb · 40 min
RecipesShoppingSettings
Soup and cake and dinner interleaved by date. Fine at 11 recipes, unusable at 40.
Proposed — grouped by course
Recipes
11 saved · 4 groups
By courseRecently savedQuick
old order kept as a filter
Unsorted · 2
Chickpea stew
tap to file · 40 min
Mains · 5
Weeknight ragù
45 min
Roast chicken, one pan
1 hr 20
Soups · 2
Leek and potato soup
30 min
RecipesShoppingSettings
four groups, not forty rows — with Unsorted surfaced at the top so backfilling is visible work, not a hidden default.
Your call
How these want to be built

Order & sizes

Sections above are in discussion order. This is the order I'd actually build them in, and why.

OrderItemSizeWhy here
1 E1 · Cook modemodal step-per-screen view M The only one that fixes something painful today. Additive and reversible — if it's wrong, deleting it leaves the app exactly as it is now.
2 E2 · Course groupinglist grouping + backfill S Cheap, but it changes the first screen you see, so it goes second — after cook mode has proved the review's read on the kitchen is right.
3 Held · Shopping list from a recipenot reviewed here L Deliberately out of scope for this round. It touches the Shopping tab's data model and deserves its own review rather than a paragraph in this one.
Your call on the order

Anything else?

When you're done: hit Save notes for Claude below, accept the download, then tell Claude "done" in the chat. Round 2 opens with everything you marked Yes banked in a Decided ledger, and a reworked section for everything you marked Discuss more.

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