AI Recipe Generation

Welcome to this lesson on generating new recipes with AI! So far, you have learned how to interact with large language models (LLMs), structure prompts, and manage LLM calls in your application. Now, you will see how these skills come together to create a feature that generates unique cooking recipes based on a list of ingredients provided by the user.

Imagine you have a few ingredients in your fridge and want to know what you can cook. With AI-powered recipe generation, your app can suggest creative, step-by-step recipes instantly. This not only makes your app more helpful but also demonstrates the power of combining AI with web development.

In this lesson, you will learn how to connect your backend to the AI, send ingredient lists, and return structured recipes to your users. By the end, you will understand the full flow of generating a recipe with AI and preparing it for use in your application.

Before we dive in, let’s briefly recall two important concepts from previous lessons:

• Prompt Templates:
  You learned how to use template files to create prompts for the AI. These templates can include placeholders (like {{ingredients}}) that are filled in with real values before being sent to the AI.

• LLM Manager:
  The LLM Manager is a helper that handles all communication with the language model. It loads the right prompts, fills in variables, sends the request, and returns the AI’s response.

These tools are the foundation for generating recipes with AI. In this lesson, you will see how they are used together in a real API route.

Let’s walk through how your app generates a recipe using AI, step by step.

Your app provides a special route for generating recipes. Here is how the route is defined:

from fastapi import APIRouter, HTTPException
from fastapi.responses import JSONResponse
from typing import List, Optional

from app.llm import generate_response
from app.schemas.recipe import IngredientsIn

router = APIRouter(prefix="/api", tags=["recipes"])

@router.post("/recipes/generate")
def generate_recipe(payload: IngredientsIn):
    ingredients = payload.ingredients or []
    if not ingredients:
        raise HTTPException(status_code=400, detail="No ingredients provided")

    ingredient_str = ", ".join(ingredients)
    # ... (rest of the code)

• This route listens for POST requests at /api/recipes/generate.
• It expects a JSON body with an ingredients list.
• If no ingredients are provided, it returns an error.

Example request:

{
  "ingredients": ["chicken", "rice", "broccoli"]
}