I Made AI Do My Grocery Shopping

The first thing I ever built with AI filled my grocery cart while I watched.

At the time I was having fun cooking for my family. New dishes, new flavors. Most of them started with a TikTok. Somebody makes something that looks amazing, I save it, and now I have a recipe with 20 plus ingredients I need to hunt down.

That hunt was the worst part. Scrubbing through the video for the ingredient list. Writing it out. Checking what we already had at home. Adding everything to my H-E-B cart one item at a time. By the time the cart was full, the fun was gone.

The question that started everything

I had just downloaded Claude Code. I did not know where to start. So I did the only thing I could do: I started asking questions.

My first real question was this one. How can I make an app where I grab a TikTok recipe, log into my H-E-B account, and have the AI find every ingredient and add it to my cart?

I want to be clear about what I was not doing. I was not writing code. I do not come from a coding background. I run an economic development corporation in a small Texas town. I was typing plain English questions into a box, the same way you would ask a smart friend.

One long night

It did not work on the first try. It took a long night of trial and error, asking questions, hitting walls, and asking better questions.

And then it worked.

The app took over my computer. I watched the mouse move around on its own. It opened H-E-B, found the ingredients from the recipe, and added everything to my shopping cart, one by one, while I sat there.

I was blown away. That is the honest word for it. That night is where my whole AI journey started.

Steal it: how you would build this today

This is the part I care about. Not the grocery app. The fact that you can do this too. Here is the plain version.

1. Get AI on your computer, not in a browser tab. Download the Claude app. The browser version can chat. The app version can actually use your computer, and that is the whole trick.

2. Describe the job like you would to a person. Mine was one sentence: grab the ingredients from this recipe, log into my H-E-B account, and add them all to my cart. No technical words. Say what you want done.

3. Expect trial and error. Mine took one long night. It will get something wrong, you tell it what went wrong, and it fixes it. That loop is the skill. Not coding. Asking.

4. Watch it drive. The first time the mouse moves by itself, you will understand why I have not stopped building since.

What I actually got out of it

Not the app. I got proof, on my own screen, that this stuff is real and that a regular person can use it. Every build I have shipped since, and there are a lot of them now, traces back to that one night with a grocery cart.

If you have been watching AI from the outside and thinking it belongs to somebody else, it does not. You’re not behind. You just have not had your grocery cart moment yet.

So steal this. That is the whole point of the series. And tell me in the comments or replies: what would you have your AI build? I’ll tell you where I’d start.

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This is Part 1 of Cool Shit I Built With AI, a series where I share real problems I solved with AI so you can see what is possible for yourself. The video version is on Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube at @danielonpurpose.