Feature Request: Liftosaur Style Text Based Recipe Import/Export

[780Farva]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

While not specifically a problem, I just dislike clicking through form field entries to add new local recipes. This idea is really inspired by an app called Liftosaur and how it describes weighlifting programs in a small but powerful domain-specific-language, Liftoscript . I've really enjoyed the workflows that text based import/export has enabled over on that app, and I think that pattern would apply really well to timer.coffee.

Describe the solution you'd like

Having an alternative text based recipe import/export feature would unlock a few use cases that I think are useful/interesting:

• Copy-paste sharing: users could share recipes in Discord, Reddit, and YouTube comments as text. There’s currently no (obvious to me) way to do that directly without manually re-entering every field.
• Portability: recipes as plain text can be version-controlled, backed up, or shared outside the app if a user wanted to. Maybe competitive baristas with Git skills might find value here.
• Rapid iteration: power users might want to quickly create multiple variations of a recipe while dialing in their process, without clicking through multiple form fields over and over.
• Voice-to-text recipe creation: Imagine you’re working on a new recipe and want to speak through your steps and techniques out loud to some dictation app while you work. That transcription could be fed to an LLM, prompted to understand the format of a text recipe, and would likely do a good job of turning your session into a functional timer.coffee text recipe.

Describe alternatives you've considered

• Doing nothing, just relying on built-in recipes and avoiding making my own

Additional context

The form would certainly stay the primary UI for casual users, this is an additional feature for power users and total nerds. The exact format is an open question (happy to discuss, and I have some ideas ready to go).

I’d be happy to help implement this, just let me know if there’s interest!

[antonkarliner]

@780Farva Hey! This is indeed a very interesting topic, thanks for the links. I was thinking about some sort of "recipe conversion tool" for a while now and my main working idea is LLM-based workflow with text as input and structured output. Given that inference becomes more and more cost-effective, I definitely should give it a try soon. By the way, how many recipes per month/week do you usually create?

[780Farva]

@antonkarliner very cool, glad I caught you while your mind has been somewhat on this topic!

A system like this could be good for backup/restore of the brew diary too. That could help with migrating to timer.coffee from other apps potentially as well.

Personally I'm not yet making tons of recipes, but I imagine serious coffee folk treat recipe creation like a product and need to iterate smoothly. So I had a persona like that in mind when suggesting this more than myself, to be honest.

[antonkarliner]

@780Farva Hey! Some news on this.

Export is done as of version 3.8.2 — you can export your brew diary as Markdown (the whole diary, one bean's history, or a single brew), and there's a full data export in Settings.

For import I'm designing the architecture now. The idea is that you paste a recipe in any text format and an LLM converts it into the app's structure, so nobody has to learn a syntax. In the works, no timeline yet.

[780Farva]

Unreal! I think that's awesome.