I've spent my career designing electronics systems — edge devices, embedded firmware, cloud-connected hardware. I know what an API is. I know what a database schema looks like.
What I'd never done was build a website. The toolchain is completely different. React, Next.js, CSS, authentication flows, deployment pipelines — none of it mapped to anything I'd done before.
Today, Tablewell is live. Real users. A paying subscriber. My family uses it every week.
Here's how it happened.
The Problem
I started using Claude to help plan family dinners. It worked great — but every week I had to re-explain everything from scratch. No memory. No state. Just a blank slate.
As an engineer, that bothered me. So I built something to fix it.
What I Built
Tablewell is an AI meal planning app for families. Tell it about your household once — who eats, what you love, your budget, how much time you have on weeknights. Hit Generate. A full week of dinners and a grocery list appear in about 60 seconds.
Rate the meals as you cook them. Next week gets smarter automatically.
It runs on 8 integrated services: Next.js, Supabase, Stripe, Vercel, the Anthropic Claude API, Upstash Redis, Cloudflare, and Google Search Console.
Where Claude Made the Difference
The concepts weren't foreign to me — I just needed to learn the web implementation. Claude was essentially a senior web developer I could ask anything without judgment.
"I need to make sure users can only read their own data" — walk me through Supabase's RLS policies.
"This Stripe webhook isn't firing" — here's what the stack trace is telling you and why.
"How should I structure this API route" — here are the tradeoffs.
Honestly? Claude wrote most of the code. What I brought was the product vision, the architecture decisions, and the engineering judgment to know what to build and why. I stayed at the functional level — understanding how the pieces connect, what the system needs to do — while Claude handled the implementation. I still don't understand every line of code in the app. But I understand the whole system. That distinction turned out to be exactly the right division of labor.
What I'd Tell an Engineer in the Same Position
Your domain knowledge is a real advantage — don't undersell it. The gap between "I understand the concepts" and "I know this specific stack" is smaller than it looks. Give yourself a few weeks. It clicks.
And ship something real as fast as possible. The learning from a live app with real users is worth more than anything you'll learn in isolation.
Try Tablewell free
Plan your family's dinners for the week in about 60 seconds. No credit card required.
Get started at tablewell.app →Use code BETA2026 for $2 off the Family plan
Questions or thoughts? ryan@truerthings.co