We kept fighting about groceries. So I built an AI to end it

For a long time, Sunday evening at our place had a fixed ritual.

Someone would open the Picnic app. Someone would ask: "So, what are we eating this week?" And then it would go quiet.

Not because it's a hard question. Because it's the same question, every single week, and nobody really feels like answering it again.

The weekly grocery struggle

Ordering groceries sounds like a two-minute job. Tap a few products, pick a delivery slot, done.

In practice, it went more like this.

First, the menu. What did we eat last week? Do we have anything left over? Something quick for the busy evenings. Not pasta again. Not that dish again either, nobody liked it last time. Do we still have that recipe somewhere?

Then the basics. Is there still milk? Did we order spread last week, or was that the week before? We definitely need bread. Probably eggs. Coffee? Somebody check the cupboard.

Then the actual order. Scrolling through categories, searching for the right brand, finding out halfway that one ingredient isn't available, swapping a recipe, starting the list again.

And then, on Wednesday, discovering that we forgot the one thing we actually needed.

None of that is difficult. But it's a small project that has to be run every week, without exception. And somebody has to run it.

Who is actually doing the thinking?

At some point the irritation turned into a proper conversation. And honestly, it wasn't a comfortable one for me.

Because I thought I was doing my part. I was happy to do the shopping, or to put the order together in the app. But for that, my partner had usually already figured out what we were going to eat, what we needed for it, and what else had to be restocked.

In other words: I quite liked doing the last bit, after most of the thinking had already been done.

That's what people mean by mental load. Not the chore itself, but the planning, the remembering and the deciding around it. It's invisible, because it happens in someone's head. You only notice it when it keeps landing on the same person, and that person gets fed up with it.

From a discussion to a project

The obvious fix is to divide it better. Take turns. Make a schedule. Write a list on the fridge.

But that doesn't remove the thinking. It just moves it around. One week it's my partner sighing at the app, the next week it's me.

So I asked a different question: what if nobody had to do the thinking anymore?

Not the ordering itself. Supermarkets have that covered. Everything before it:

• deciding what we'll eat, without the same dishes every week
• working out what's probably running low, without anyone checking the cupboard
• turning that into a cart that more or less fits our normal budget

That's exactly the kind of thing I'd been wanting to try with an AI agent. So I built one. How it works is a story of its own: How my grocery agent works.

What Sunday looks like now

These days, the agent does the thinking.

During the week, the kitchen tablet already shows six candidate dinners for next week, and we tap the four we feel like. That's the whole menu discussion now: a few taps, whenever someone walks past. (More about that tablet: A kitchen tablet that rates dinner.)

On Sunday, I ask the agent to do the groceries. It takes the dinners we picked, checks our order history to see which basics are probably running low, and shows me the plan. When I say it's fine, it fills the Picnic cart: the recipes, the swaps it has learned (fresh pesto, never pre-chopped onions), and only the basics we actually need.

I scroll through the cart, maybe change one thing, and press order.

That's it. Nobody stares at the app on Sunday evening anymore. Nobody has to remember whether there's still milk. And the question "what are we eating this week?" has quietly stopped being a discussion.

Why it still doesn't order on its own

The one thing the agent isn't allowed to do is place the order. It also can't pick a delivery slot.

Not because that's technically impossible, but because I don't see the benefit. Filling a cart is the boring work. Checking a €100 cart and pressing order takes almost no effort, and it's my chance to notice that we're unexpectedly not eating at home on Wednesday.

Human-in-the-loop might sound like a fancy AI term. Here it just means I don't want six litres of milk on my doorstep because my script made a wrong assumption somewhere.

It was never really about groceries

Looking back, the grocery argument wasn't about groceries at all. It was about one person carrying a recurring piece of thinking that the other one barely noticed.

Dividing that thinking more fairly would have helped. Removing it turned out to be even better. And, as a bonus, it gave me a pretty great side project.

The ideal I had in mind was deliberately boring: on Sunday, just say "do this week's groceries", get back four normal dishes we'll all eat, check the cart, and order.

We're pretty much there. And Sunday evenings are a lot quieter.