Recipes
A box is a directory of your data, kept under version control with a full history of changes (using git); a card is a markdown file with a structured header; the agent is the coding agent (Claude Code or Codex) that operates the box. A recipe is a card with a structured body the recipe view understands.
What it does for you
- Scales every ingredient amount to a batch size you choose, from a single serving count marked in the card.
- Numbers steps automatically and keeps substitutions attached to the ingredient or step they apply to, instead of buried in prose.
- Links to a sub-recipe (a sauce inside a larger dish) so it can be reused across recipes instead of copy-pasted.
- Records where a recipe came from, whether that's a cookbook, a person, a URL, or a captured web page, so its origin isn't lost.
What it needs
A recipe is created by the agent from something you tell it, paste, or have it capture from a web page or photo. Recipes are an optional add-on (a plugin, a bundled library of card types and views that a box turns on). A new box does not have them until the agent activates the recipe plugin and writes two small files in the box, one for the card type and one for the view; the documentation describes this as a task the agent does on request, and the engine's health check flags recipe cards in a box that has not done it. Nothing else is needed. The documentation does not say how smoothly the agent does this unprompted.
How it works, briefly
A recipe card's body uses a small set of markup tags (a serving-size yield, per-ingredient amounts, steps, substitutions, sub-recipe links) that the recipe view reads to display and scale the recipe. Those tags are valid only in recipe cards. Recipes are stored in the box (under _content/recipes/, for the curious); the agent files and organizes them there on request, not on a schedule.
Limits
The documentation does not describe nutrition calculation, meal planning, or a shopping-list generator built on top of recipe cards; those would be built as separate views or procedures if you asked for them.
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