He Got a Custom Recipe App in Five Minutes While Walking His Dog

Ben Thompson was out walking his dog when he ordered up a new app. He did not search an app store, pay for anything, or read a manual. He just talked to an AI assistant on his phone, and about five minutes later the app existed.

Thompson is a technology analyst who studies big software platforms. He was trying Muse, Meta's AI assistant, which gives every user in the United States a small online computer, called a virtual machine, with two processor cores, 8 gigabytes of memory, and 8 gigabytes of storage.

The idea came from a friend, who had used Muse to sort through his favorite posts on Instagram. Thompson asked Muse to organize all the recipes he had saved in Instagram. The first answer was a PDF, which was hard to browse and search.

So he asked for something better: a personal recipe box, built just for him. That matters, Thompson says, because it was built to do one job for him alone.

Thompson calls that kind of software the infinite app. An assistant that can operate phones and websites for you, he argues, can also create a simple, custom screen whenever you need one, and then you can forget about it.

That would be a break from how phones have worked. Thompson counts 689 apps on his own phone, accumulated because each service or game once seemed worth learning. Now, he says, he opens fewer and fewer of them because the AI can handle the clicking around for him.

The recipe app is still a work in progress. Thompson said he asked Muse to "actually read the captions and watch the videos" so the recipes are easier to find. The update, he said, is "subject to Instagram rate limiting."

Thompson says he can be patient. He joked: "I have 689 other apps to look at in the meantime. Of course, I'm not going to do that."