Julia's first prototype

Julia’s app has a working name he doesn’t buy (Eligio, “yo elijo” ▸ 0:32) and a pain she’s lived for a decade: two vegetarians squinting at fifty-line ingredient lists hunting for gelatin, when the answer should be a chat away, “¿hay gelatina?” ▸ 3:00. His tutoring instruction is one sentence: “habla con Gemini, explícale la idea y saca el MVP” ▸ 6:00, and she comes back with an architecture he rates as genuinely simple: flow A, scan the barcode, look it up ▸ 6:47; flow B, if unknown, photograph the ingredients and let the model read them ▸ 7:18.

Two interventions carry the teaching. First, don’t invent expertise: when she considered scoring products with her own formula, the answer was that neither of them is a nutritionist, and the open-source database they found ▸ 8:54 already ships the NOVA classification, a processing traffic light maintained by people who are ▸ 9:10. Second, the scope knife he’s been cut by himself: for a first project, with no API or database experience yet, build one flow, not two ▸ 10:41.

el tutor no da código; da la pregunta a Gemini y el cuchillo del alcance →

The design argument they do have is instructive: her double-photo verification (front and label, because “nueva fórmula” hides in small print) versus his user-laziness veto, “a mí ya me da pereza tomar una foto, imagínate dos” ▸ 12:15, rigor against friction, unresolved and correctly so, a prototype question. And the north star gets named for later: this app in the Ray-Ban Display, the supermarket aisle rendered as a row of green and red lights ▸ 13:16. First, though: one flow, one photo, one prototype…