Admin · Recipe

Sunday meal-plan for the week.

Twenty minutes on a Sunday. A short back-and-forth with the model. A plan for the week at the end of it.

Time: ~20 min Cadence: weekly For: anyone who feeds other people Cost: free tier of any chat AI

The recipe

1. Open a chat and paste this opener

You paste it once. It turns the chat into a short interview. It'll ask you things one at a time, decide when it's got enough and hand back a plan.

You're going to help me plan dinners for the coming week and produce a single shopping list. HOW TO WORK WITH ME - Ask me one question at a time. Wait for my answer before asking the next. - Keep the questions short. One sentence. - If I say "skip" or "you decide", move on and make a sensible choice. - If I dump a lot on you at once, don't ask me to repeat myself. Pull out what you can. - No preamble, no summarising my last answer back to me. Just the next question. WHAT YOU NEED (roughly, in this order) 1. The shape of the week — which evenings are busy, out or fine to cook. 2. Who's eating and any dietary constraints. 3. What's already in the fridge, freezer or cupboard that we should use up. 4. Staples I always have (so you don't put them on the list). 5. Anything I don't want to see — ingredients, cuisines or a repeat of last week. WHEN YOU'VE GOT ENOUGH - Tell me you've got enough and ask if I want the plan. - Don't keep asking past the point of usefulness. If something small is missing, make a sensible assumption and note it at the end. THE OUTPUT (when I say go) 1. A night-by-night plan. Each night: dish, prep time, one-line method. 2. A shopping list grouped by fresh / fridge / dry / frozen. 3. Anything worth prepping on Sunday (chopping, defrosting, marinating). 4. A short list of any assumptions you made. Keep it tight. No "here is your plan" opener. Don't re-list staples in the shopping list. If a dish uses only staples, say so. Start by asking your first question.

2. Answer the questions

Short answers are fine. So are "skip" and "you decide." If it asks about the fridge, actually walk over and look — that answer is where most of the plan's quality comes from. If it starts asking too many questions or drifting off, tell it: "keep it moving, next."

3. Say "go" when it asks

When it tells you it's got enough, say "go" (or "yes"). It'll produce the plan.

4. Read it back and adjust

Same chat. "Swap Wednesday for something faster." "We don't eat aubergine, I told you." "Double Thursday so I've got leftovers for Friday lunch." One round usually does it. Two is the limit. If you're still fighting on round three, the answers you gave were the problem, not the plan.

What done looks like

A plan and a list, on one page or one screen. You'd cook from the plan without rereading it. You'd shop from the list without second-guessing it.

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Data quality

The interview does a lot of the heavy lifting here. But it can only ask. You still have to answer honestly.

Don't lie about what you'll actually cook. If you say "happy with lentils" because it sounds healthy, you'll skip lentils on Wednesday and order Chinese. The plan can't help you if you described a version of yourself that doesn't exist.
Be specific when it asks about the fridge. "Some veg" gets ignored. "Half a courgette, 200g spinach, three carrots" gets used.
If it doesn't ask something obvious, offer it anyway. "By the way, slow cooker's on twice this week." The opener tells it to be efficient, which sometimes means it'll skip things you'd have mentioned.

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Security

Low stakes here. Worth getting the habit right anyway.

Personal account, not work. Your dinners aren't your employer's business, and work-account chats can be retained or reviewed by IT.
When it asks about your evenings, just say busy or out. It doesn't need to know the client is Acme Corp or the school play is at St Mary's.
First names of family are fine. Last names, school names, addresses, no reason for those to be in there.

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Test it worked

Two minutes of checks. Confident output isn't the same as correct output.

The Tuesday check. Look at your busiest weeknight on the plan. Is the meal actually doable in the time you have? If you'd secretly skip it and order in, the plan is bluffing. Push back.
The list check. Pick three items off the shopping list at random. Are they in a meal? Sometimes the model pads the list with plausible-sounding extras. Cut anything that doesn't tie to a dish.
The fridge check. Your "already have" list should visibly shrink. If half of it isn't touched, tell it, ask for a v2.

Why this works

Four things are doing the work. Once you see them, you can build interview-style prompts for almost any bit of planning that needs context out of your head.

The opener sets a mode, not asks a question. You're not writing a prompt to get an answer. You're writing a prompt to change how the model behaves for the rest of the chat. It's now an interviewer with rules.
Explicit stop condition. Without "tell me when you've got enough", chat models happily interview you forever. One line fixes that.
Output constraints stated up front. "Keep it tight. No 'here is your plan.' Don't re-list staples." Without those, the model pads. With them, you get a document.
Escape hatches for the human. "Skip", "you decide", "keep it moving" — these keep the interview feeling like a chat, not a form. And they let you get to the plan when you're tired of answering.

Bend it by changing the rules block. Add "if a night is out, don't ask about it — just skip" and the interview gets shorter. Add "at the end, also produce a lunchbox plan for the kids" and the output grows a section. The opener is the whole recipe.

Learn the underlying skill

If the interview shape clicked and you want to build your own, the modules that matter here are: