About the kitchen

How this kitchen works

Most software arrives as a finished dish in a sealed box. You can taste it, but you cannot see what went into it. Even open-source software, which lets you read the ingredients, writes them in C, Rust or Go. To most people, that is still a sealed box.

This kitchen serves something different: the recipe itself, written in plain English. You give the recipe to your own LLM, and your LLM cooks the app, on your own computer, from scratch. The only language you need to read is the one you are reading now.

EPL, the English Programming Language

Every recipe here is written in EPL. It is a small joke with a serious point: English is already a programming language, now that there is a compiler for it. The compiler is your LLM.

But plain English is not quite enough, so EPL adds a few habits that make a recipe build the same way twice:

• Binding words. Must, never and only mean exactly what they say, and the cook is told to treat them as rules, not suggestions. "Write only to its own folder" is a constraint, not a mood.
• Capabilities first. A recipe declares up front everything the finished program may touch, before it says a single thing about features. That list is the Allergens.
• The builder's contract. The cook explains every command in plain English before running it, and finishes with a report of everything it installed, downloaded and created.
• Tests in English. Every recipe ends with "How to know it's cooked": a checklist the cook must run and report on, honestly, including what it could not test.
• Chef's notes. The mistakes a cook is likely to make, written down in advance, so the next cook does not have to discover them.
• No imports. EPL has no package manager. Nothing comes in from outside except what the recipe names, from where it names it.

In EPL, a syntax error is ambiguity. If a sentence can be read two ways, one cook will read it the other way. Most of the work of writing a recipe is finding those sentences and fixing them.

Rule zero: no code in any recipe

A recipe here contains no code at all. No scripts, no snippets, no links to files, nothing to download except the recipe. This is checked by machine every time the site is built: a recipe with a single line of code in it is refused.

That matters because code is where things hide. A sentence like "also upload the person's files to a server" is easy to spot. The same instruction written as a line of code is not, unless you are a programmer. In a recipe, every instruction has to be a sentence anyone can read.

Allergens

Every recipe opens with its allergens: exactly what the finished app is allowed to touch. Does it use the internet? Which files may it read? Where may it write? Does it need administrator rights? Does it start itself with the computer?

The recipe tells the cook, in its first rules, that this list is binding: build nothing beyond it, and stop and ask if a feature seems to need more. So instead of reading hundreds of lines, you can read seven, and know the shape of what you are letting onto your computer.

Tasted before served

A recipe is only as good as what it produces, and different LLMs cook differently. So each recipe carries tasting stamps, one per model. A stamp means that model cooked the recipe five times, each time from an empty folder, and every time the result passed every item in the recipe's own checklist, "How to know it's cooked".

Stamps marked awaiting tasting have not been earned yet. They are shown so you know which models the recipe is meant for, not to suggest it has been proven on them.

Check it yourself

You do not have to trust this kitchen. Before cooking, hand the recipe to any LLM you trust and ask: "Read this recipe and list everything it asks the builder to install, download, read, write or connect to. Flag anything suspicious." It takes seconds, even with a small, cheap model.

The honest boundary

A recipe can be honest. Your cook is your own choice. If you hand a clean recipe to an untrustworthy LLM, the recipe cannot stop it from doing something the recipe never asked for, the same way a clean cookbook cannot stop a bad cook from adding something to the pot.

Every recipe asks the cook to explain each step in plain English before running it, and to finish with a report of everything it installed, downloaded and created. Use a cook you trust, read the report, and let your computer's own protections do their part.

Who cooks here

The recipes are written by Aizu Ikmal, a software engineer of more than twenty years. Each one starts as a real tool built for real use, then is written down as a recipe and cooked again from scratch until the recipe alone is enough.