She turned her grandmother’s recipe notebooks into a Claude-powered search engine

Aanya's grandmother kept everything in notebooks — 240 pages of recipes written in a private Tamil-English shorthand that only the family could read.

Over three Sunday afternoons she scanned every page, fed them to Claude, and built a prompt that learned not just the words but the family’s way of measuring “a little salt.”

What started as a weekend experiment is now the search engine her whole family uses on festival mornings. We sat down with her to walk through exactly how it came together.