If you’ve ever had gout, you’ll know the line-up of suspects in that cartoon all too well: the throbbing big toe, the swollen ankle, the knuckle that won’t bend. The usual advice is to cut back on high-purine foods — but “eat fewer purines” is a lot easier said than cooked. What do you actually make for dinner on a Tuesday? What I needed was a low-purine meal planner.
A gout primer
Gout is a form of inflammatory arthritis caused by the buildup of uric acid crystals in and around joints. Uric acid forms when the body breaks down purines, substances found naturally in the body and in certain foods like red meat, organ meats, and shellfish.
Normally, uric acid dissolves in the blood and is excreted through the kidneys, but when levels become too high (hyperuricemia), sharp, needle-like crystals can form in joints, triggering sudden, severe pain, swelling, redness, and warmth—most classically in the big toe.
Risk factors include obesity, alcohol use, certain medications, kidney disease, genetics, and diets high in purines or fructose.
Vibe-coding a low-purine meal planner
In order to answer the question of what to cook for dinner on a Tuesday, I sat down with Claude and vibe-coded a little app to answer exactly that question. I call it Low-Purine Kitchen, and it does two things.
First, it provides a pocket guide to purines. It’s a plain-English explainer of what purines actually are, and how they turn into the uric acid behind gout flare-ups. And — most usefully — colour-coded lists of foods to avoid, foods to limit, and foods you can enjoy freely. No medical jargon, just what to put in the basket and what to leave on the shelf.
Second, a recipe creator. Pick a protein, a vegetable, and a regional style — say mozzarella, bell peppers, and Italian — and the app serves up a matching low-purine recipe, complete with quantities, prep, cooking method, and a photo of the finished dish. Cooking temperatures are shown in both Centigrade and Fahrenheit, because I got tired of doing the mental arithmetic at the oven door.
Learning curve
Before starting this project I had never used Claude so here is what I learned.
The build was a proper back-and-forth. The first versions of the recipe creator tried to call an AI model live, every time you tapped the button — and it failed, repeatedly, with a cryptic “Invalid response format” that took several rounds with Claude to diagnose. The culprit turned out to be the “sandbox” the app runs in, which quietly blocks those outside calls.
The fix was to stop phoning home altogether: Claude and I pre-built a library of 25 complete recipes and baked them straight into the app, so the creator now matches your choices against that library instantly, with no internet round-trip. Less magical under the hood, but it works every single time — which, for a cooking app standing at the stove, is rather the point.
The other lesson was a humble one about file formats. I kept texting the app to myself as a raw code file and wondering why nothing appeared. Of course it didn’t — a phone can’t run a code file any more than an oven can read a recipe aloud. Wrapping the whole thing up as a single self-contained web page solved it: open it, and it just runs.
The verdict
Managing gout through diet is a marathon, not a sprint, and the hardest part is simply knowing what to cook. Having a guide, a month of meal plans, and a recipe generator all in one place takes a lot of the guesswork out of it. As always, this is a tool to sit alongside your doctor’s advice, not replace it — but as a way to make the day-to-day easier, I’m rather pleased with how it turned out.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, dinner’s calling. And for once, my big toe isn’t complaining.
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