Miami-based Pincho needed a new solution for managing its recipes. The 12-unit burger and kebab chain was still storing them in an Excel spreadsheet, and none of its existing tech vendors offered a recipe management tool.
So CEO and co-founder Otto Othman began shopping around for software that would allow the chain to upload and store recipes as well as export them to its training system. But he wasn’t satisfied with anything he found.
“I wanted one source of truth. And I couldn't find anything like that,” Othman said. “And I'm like, you know what, screw it. I'm just going to try to build this thing.”
Othman is a self-proclaimed computer nerd who went to school for programming, but he hasn’t actually written code for 15 years. He had, however, been messing around with a few AI coding tools like Replit and Lovable.
One night, he typed his idea for a recipe app into Replit, which allows users to create their own apps by chatting with an AI bot, no programming knowledge required.
By 1 a.m., Othman had built the tool he’d been looking for, or rather, Replit built it, following Othman’s instructions.
“You're just talking to a developer and he's your personal developer,” Othman said of the process. “And it's like the future. It's the craziest thing.”
Othman is one of many people who have discovered the magic of “vibe coding,” the AI-powered software development process that could change how apps get built and by whom. (A month ago in this column, we wrote about an Atlanta high-school student who started a tech company with a vibe-coded app.)
The phrase vibe coding has only existed for about a year, but the consensus seems to be that AI coding programs have improved rapidly, particularly in recent months.
“Before, A.I. coding tools were often useful, but halting and clumsy,” wrote technologist Paul Ford in an opinion column for the New York Times. “Now, [Claude] can run for a full hour and make whole, designed websites and apps that may be flawed, but credible.”
Anthropic’s release of a host of new Claude tools in early February triggered a widespread selloff in software stocks like Salesforce and Adobe, sparking fears of what’s been dubbed the SaaSpocalypse. (SaaS = software as a service, a label that applies to many restaurant tech vendors.)
The concern is, in essence, “Why will anyone need all that legacy software when A.I. can code anything up for you in two shakes of a robotic lamb’s tail?” Ford wrote.
There are reasons to believe these fears may be exaggerated. Big tech companies have resources and expertise that individual vibe coders do not. And they are developing their own AI tools to compete against upstarts. ChatGPT initially seemed to pose a threat to Google, for instance. Google responded with AI overviews and its own chatbot, Gemini. Its stock is up more than 80% over the past year.
That said, Othman does believe that restaurant tech companies should be concerned about the rise of AI coding tools.
“100%,” he said. “The people who are innovating with AI are going to take business from these other big SaaS companies.” On a small scale, his home-brewed recipe tool probably just did that.
The beauty of that tool, which Othman is calling Recipe Kit, based on a Replit suggestion, is that it was built specifically for Pincho. Othman didn’t have to work with a vendor to adapt a product to the needs of his brand or its tech stack.
On the other hand, it also means Othman is now essentially his own tech vendor, responsible for managing Recipe Kit and fixing it when something goes wrong. It adds more work to his plate. But he plans to outsource that work, probably to AI.
“I can basically now go to another [AI] agent and be like, ‘I need you to live on my website as my customer service. And whenever people have a bug or an issue, I need you to respond, I need you to look at it, and I need you to integrate with Replit and try to solve it and fix it,’” he said.
That type of support mechanism may be necessary sooner rather than later: After Othman posted about his recipe management tool on LinkedIn, other restaurateurs began contacting him about using it.
He went back to Replit and asked it to turn the app into a platform that would allow multiple restaurants to sign up. Now, users can get a free account for up to five recipes, and after that, they can sign up for an unlimited paid account for $20 a month. (The most difficult part of the whole project, Othman said, was connecting Recipe Kit to the Stripe payments service so that it could accept credit cards.)
“Now I have this thing that I'm going to start sharing with my friends where they can go in and they can sign up their own restaurants and upload their own recipes, and I can start monetizing,” he said. “If I can make $1,000 a month, that's amazing.”
The true test will be how well Recipe Kit can withstand actual day-to-day use. Pincho’s culinary and operations team still has to input its recipes, and then it will go live chainwide, Othman said. But they are excited about it.
And Othman is not done. Now that he has developed one app, he’s thinking of other tech he could create or replace, such as the checklist program Pincho currently uses.
“We pay a fee. Why?” he said. “I can just build that out. I don't need anybody else.”
Not only that, but if he wants to add a feature, all he has to do is ask.
Othman said the rise of AI coding reminds him of the early days of the internet, when the possibilities for innovation seemed endless.
“It's a great time to be alive,” he said. “Embrace AI, and you can literally build anything you want now. It's not as hard as it used to be.”