MealQuest/docs/ARCHITECTURE.md

MealQuest architecture

This mirrors the architecture section of CONTEXT.MD in the CTXD project mealquest, which is the source of record; if the two disagree, CTXD wins and this file should be updated. It describes the planned application. The repository today is the Feature 01 scaffold: cmd/server, internal/config, internal/server (/health), internal/frontend (embedded PWA with SPA fallback), the web/ skeleton, Makefile, Dockerfile and CI.

Decision numbers (D-NNN) refer to DECISIONS.MD in CTXD.

Topology

PWA (phone / tablet / desktop)
   │ HTTPS
   ▼
Traefik v3.6 — 10.60.1.33
   file route: mealquest-ccl.yml
   │
   ▼
docker compose project "mealquest" — 10.60.1.14
   ├── mealquest   Go service + embedded PWA, host 8090 → container 8080
   ├── searxng     sidecar for recipe search; internal compose network
   │               only, no published port
   └── Litestream  SQLite replication → Synology NAS 10.60.1.50

One Go service serves the API, the auth flow, media and the PWA. Its SQLite database is replicated by Litestream to the NAS.

Traefik terminates TLS. The service honours X-Forwarded-For and X-Forwarded-Proto only from peers listed in MEALQUEST_TRUSTED_PROXY (comma-separated IPs/CIDRs; production lists 10.60.1.33); from any other peer they are ignored. The client is the rightmost X-Forwarded-For address that is not a trusted proxy. The resolved client IP is added as client_ip to every log line written while handling a request. The OIDC redirect URI and the Secure cookies are fixed by MEALQUEST_PUBLIC_URL, never by request headers, so sign-in works whichever peer the request arrives from.

Repository layout

Path	Purpose
cmd/server	Entry point; wiring only.
internal/config	Env-only MEALQUEST_* config; secrets from *_FILE.
internal/server	HTTP server, router, middleware.
internal/frontend	Embedded PWA, SPA fallback.
internal/auth	Authentik OIDC, sessions, CSRF.
internal/db, internal/store	SQLite connections, sqlc queries.
internal/secretbox	AES-256-GCM encryption for _ct columns.
internal/household, internal/dinners, internal/recipes	Domain.
internal/ai/llm, internal/ai/harness, internal/ai/skills	AI provider adapters, skill harness, skills.
internal/suggest, internal/plan, internal/shopping, internal/ideas	Feature services.
internal/gcal, internal/notify, internal/push, internal/chat	Integrations.
internal/jobs, internal/scheduler	Background jobs and schedules.
migrations/	SQL migrations (no goose or golang-migrate).
web/	React PWA.
deploy/	Deployment files.
docs/	Documentation.
design/	Requirements and UI handoff (read-only reference).

Backend stack and conventions

• Go 1.25, CGO_ENABLED=0, a single static binary.
• Router: go-chi/chi/v5. Logging: log/slog JSON.
• SQLite via modernc.org/sqlite, with journal_mode=WAL, foreign_keys=ON and busy_timeout. One writer connection plus a read pool. Queries generated by sqlc.
• IDs are ULIDs (oklog/ulid/v2).
• Timestamps are stored in UTC; local calendar dates are YYYY-MM-DD strings in the household timezone.
• Configuration is environment-only (MEALQUEST_*). Secrets come only from files named by *_FILE variables. Missing or invalid config stops startup.
• Error responses always have the body {"error":{"code":"…","message":"…","retryable":false}}.

Authentication

• Authentik OIDC; the backend is a confidential client (coreos/go-oidc/v3, golang.org/x/oauth2).
• Session cookie __Host-mealquest_session (HttpOnly, Secure, SameSite=Lax). Sessions expire after 30 days idle or 180 days absolute.
• Non-GET requests require the CSRF header X-MealQuest-CSRF.
• Access requires membership of the Authentik group mealquest-admin. There is a single role: one shared household, no per-person profiles.

Data model

Columns ending in _ct hold AES-256-GCM ciphertext (via secretbox).

Table	Holds
household_settings	One row: timezone, dinner_time (17:30), reminder_time (16:30), review_time (09:00), plan_draft day/time (Fri 09:00), suggestions day/time (Sun 08:00), chat_autosend day/time (Sat 08:00), onboarding_completed_at, updates_seen_at.
recipes	A real recipe page: source_url (unique), site_name, title, total/prep/cook minutes (the page's JSON-LD), yield, raw_jsonld, fetched_at; and its grounding: photo_id, method, difficulty, minutes_total (normalized prep to table).
recipe_ingredients	recipe_id, position, raw_text, name, qty, unit, note.
recipe_steps	recipe_id, position, text.
photos	source_url, local_path, width, height, sha256, fetched_at.
dinners	The meal record and its lifecycle: name, normalized_name, status (suggested / quest_log / tried / regular / archived), origin, method, minutes_total, difficulty, cuisine, is_favorite, recipe_id, recipe_url (a pasted recipe link awaiting grounding), photo_id, grounding_status (pending / grounded / failed / manual), grounding_error (why grounding failed), grounding_revision (raised whenever a dinner is renamed, so only the latest ground_dinner job may write it and no candidate offered before the rename grounds it), updated_by.
suggestion_batches	trigger, status, ai_run_id.
suggestions	dinner_id, batch_id, name (the name the dish was suggested under, kept whatever its dinner is later renamed, so a Pass stays an immutable record every later batch dedupes against), reason, cited_regular_ids (JSON), status, decided_at.
week_plans	week_start (unique), status (draft / synced / changed), ai_note, ai_run_id, calendar_synced_at.
plan_days	plan_id, date (unique per plan), dinner_id, is_new, calendar_event_id.
rotation_reviews	dinner_id + plan_date (unique), status, decision (keep / drop / not_made), decided_at, updated_by.
shopping_lists	week_start (unique), plan_id, title, status (current / archived), sent_to_chat_at, frozen_at.
shopping_groups / shopping_items	One group per dinner/day; item name, qty, needed (bool), position.
ai_settings	One row: provider, base_url, model, temperature, system_prompt, api_key_ct, api_key_last4, key_verified_at.
recipe_search_settings	One row: provider (searxng / brave), base_url (the SearXNG instance), api_key_ct and api_key_last4 (Brave).
integrations_google	One row: refresh_token_ct, calendar_id, calendar_name, connected_at, last_sync_error.
chat_settings	One row: webhook_url_ct, space_label, last_test_at, last_test_status.
notification_prefs	event (plan_ready / list_ready / day_of_reminder / new_suggestions / rotation_review), push, chat.
push_subscriptions	endpoint (unique), p256dh, auth, user_agent, failure_count, last_success_at.
notification_outbox	event_key + channel (unique), payload, status, attempts, next_attempt_at, last_error.
jobs	kind, status, payload, result (progressive), error, timestamps.
schedule_runs	schedule, period_key (unique).
ai_runs	skill, skill_version, provider, model, temperature, status, latency_ms, tokens_in/out, error, redacted request/response (30-day retention).
sessions	id_hash, subject, email, name, groups, csrf_token, created/last_seen/expires.

recipes holds a fetched recipe page; dinners holds the household's meal record and its lifecycle, optionally linked to a recipe and a photo.

Dinner lifecycle

suggested (deck) ──Try it──▶ quest_log ──planned date passes──▶ tried
    │                            ▲                                │
    │                            └──────── explicit decision ─────┤
    │                                                             ├──▶ regular
    │                                                             └──▶ archived
    └──Pass──▶ archived (suggested name kept for dedupe)

From tried, an explicit decision moves the dinner to regular, to archived, or back to quest_log. Promotion to regular is never automatic (D-021).

API surface

• JSON API under /api/v1, using the error body above for every failure. It requires the session cookie and, for non-GET requests, the X-MealQuest-CSRF header.
• /auth/* — the OIDC flow.
• /media/* — cached photos, behind the session cookie. GET /media/photos/{id}-{400|1200}.jpg serves a stored size of a photo with a photos row, with Cache-Control: private, max-age=31536000, immutable; anything else is 404.
• GET/PATCH /api/v1/settings/recipe-search — provider, base_url and the Brave key (api_key, write-only: responses carry only api_key_set and api_key_last4; an empty string removes it). The result must be usable: SearXNG needs a base_url, Brave a key. Responses also carry the read-only default_base_url, the deployment's MEALQUEST_SEARXNG_URL (or null), which the client pre-fills while no base_url is saved; only a PATCH of base_url stores a URL. POST /api/v1/settings/recipe-search/test searches "chicken tikka masala" and returns {query, count}, 409 not_configured, or 502 search_failed with the provider's error.
• GET/PATCH /api/v1/settings/ai (aisettings.Service) — provider, base_url, model, temperature, system_prompt, plus the read-only api_key_last4 and key_verified_at. PATCH requires a preset name as provider, temperature 0–1 in 0.1 steps, a non-empty model and a system_prompt of at most 8000 characters; a fixed-URL preset's base_url must be empty or its own. Provider and base_url cannot change while a key is stored (remove the key first), so a stored key is never sent to an endpoint it was not stored for. PUT /api/v1/settings/ai/api-key takes {api_key} (write-only, at least 8 characters, sealed with the secret box; an empty string removes it) and clears key_verified_at; a preset without a fixed base_url takes a key only when its base_url passes secureurl.Check. POST /api/v1/settings/ai/verify calls Provider.Verify and records key_verified_at; GET /api/v1/settings/ai/models returns {models: [{id, display_name}]} live from the provider, with the key redacted from every id and display_name. Both work before a model is chosen (presets.ForAccount), answer 409 not_configured when the settings cannot build a provider, and 502 with the provider's typed error (auth_failed, rate_limited, bad_output, provider_error; 504 timeout) when the call fails. POST /api/v1/settings/ai/reset-prompt restores household.DefaultPersonaPrompt (CTXD PROMPTS.MD §4). No response holds the key. Service.HarnessConfig reads the settings for each skill run, so a saved change applies to the next run.
• Dinners (dinners.Service). POST /api/v1/dinners adds a Regular from {name} or {name, recipe_url} (an https:// link, kept in recipe_url for grounding and never returned in a dinner response, as it may carry a personal token) with status and origin regular and grounding_status pending, answering 201 with the dinner. The name is always the household's: no part of a link is ever used as a dinner's name, and a link without a name is 400. A name is trimmed, at most 120 characters and must keep a word after harness.Normalize, which sets normalized_name. A name harness.Similar to an unarchived dinner's, or a link one already has (the source_url of the recipe it is grounded in, else its pasted recipe_url), is 409 duplicate_dinner; archived names may be added again. GET /api/v1/dinners?status=regular|quest_log returns {dinners: [...]} ordered by normalized name, each with photo_url (/media/photos/{photo_id}-400.jpg, or null) and grounding_status; any other status is 400. The Quest log (quest_log) is the dinners accepted and not yet scheduled: one on the plan for the household's current week (by its timezone) or a later week is left out. PATCH /api/v1/dinners/{id} edits name (deduplicated against the other unarchived dinners), method (stovetop / oven / crockpot / grill / other), minutes_total (1–1440) and difficulty (easy / medium / hard); invalid values are 400 invalid_dinner and change nothing. DELETE /api/v1/dinners/{id} sets status archived and keeps the row; POST /api/v1/dinners/{id}/favorite toggles is_favorite. Every write records the session's subject as updated_by; an unknown id is 404.
• Dinner grounding. POST /api/v1/dinners also enqueues a ground_dinner job and answers with its grounding_job_id without waiting for it (GET /api/v1/jobs/{id} reports it); if the job cannot be enqueued it still answers 201, with grounding_status failed (grounding_error) and grounding_job_id null. The job grounds the dinner's recipe_url directly with GroundURL, else its name with Ground (see Recipe grounding), and sets grounding_status grounded with the recipe's recipe_id, photo_id, method, minutes_total and difficulty, clearing the pasted recipe_url (the recipe replaces it), or failed with grounding_error — also the job's failure code — one of no_recipe_found, recipe_unusable (the pasted link), search_not_configured, search_failed, ai_failed, interrupted (the server stopped) or grounding_error. Each job carries the dinner's grounding_revision from when it was enqueued; renaming a dinner raises the revision, and renaming a pending one enqueues a job for the new name, clearing its recipe_url when the normalized name changes. A job for a dinner archived, no longer pending or at another revision does no work, and a job only writes a dinner still unarchived, pending and at its revision, so a fix-up made meanwhile wins and an earlier job for an old name — queued or running — never decides the outcome. Archiving or renaming a dinner also stops its running job where it is, so no further search, page fetch, photo download or model call is made for it. A method, minutes_total or difficulty a member saved while the dinner was pending is kept; grounding fills only those left empty. At boot, after the job runner fails the jobs a previous process left running, every unarchived dinner still pending with no ground_dinner job for its revision queued or running is set failed with interrupted, so no dinner stays pending with nothing left to ground it. GET /api/v1/dinners/{id}/recipe-candidates searches for the dinner's name and returns {candidates: [{candidate_id, title, site_name, photo_url, minutes}]}, at most 3, ranked as Ground ranks them; it fetches pages but downloads no photo and runs no model, so photo_url is set only for a page already stored. candidate_id is an opaque id the server resolves to the page it last offered that dinner (kept in memory, so a restart means fetching the candidates again) at the grounding_revision it was searched at, so a candidate offered before any rename is refused even if the name is changed back; the page's URL, which may carry a token, is never returned or cached. An unknown dinner is 404, recipe search not set up 409 not_configured and a search failure 502 search_failed; any other failure, such as a stored recipe that cannot be read, is 500, logged with a fixed reason and the dinner id only — never a candidate's URL or dependency error text. POST /api/v1/dinners/{id}/ground takes exactly one of {candidate_id}, {recipe_url} (both grounded with GroundURL, setting grounded) or {manual: {ingredients[], steps[], minutes, method}} (1–100 ingredient lines, up to 100 steps, each non-blank and at most 500 characters; minutes 1–1440). A manual recipe is stored as typed — no model runs — as a recipes row whose source_url is mealquest:manual:{recipe_id} and whose raw_jsonld is a schema.org Recipe built from it, and sets manual with its method and minutes, no photo and the dinner's difficulty unchanged. Either clears the dinner's pasted recipe_url: the recipe chosen replaces it. It answers 200 with the dinner; an invalid body is 400, an unknown dinner 404, a page that cannot ground it 422 ungroundable (the dinner is unchanged), recipe search not set up 409 not_configured, a search or model failure 502 search_failed / ai_failed (only the reason code is logged, never the provider's text), and grounding a candidate or link that runs past 90 seconds (fetch, photo and normalize_recipe, all in the request) 504 ground_timeout, leaving the dinner unchanged. An archived dinner is 409 dinner_archived. A candidate or link is written only if the dinner is still as it was before grounding began: one renamed or grounded some other way meanwhile is 409 ground_conflict, and one archived meanwhile 409 dinner_archived, either leaving the dinner unchanged. A method, minutes or difficulty a member edits meanwhile is kept over the recipe's. Any other failure grounding a candidate or link, or recording it on the dinner, is 500, logged with a fixed reason and the dinner id only — never the link, which can carry a personal token, or dependency error text.
• Side quest suggestions (suggest.Service). POST /api/v1/suggestions/batches creates a manual batch and enqueues its suggestion_batch job, answering 202 {batch_id, job_id, trigger, status} without waiting; while a batch is pending or running it answers 202 with that batch instead, so at most one runs at a time (the check, the batch and its job share one write transaction). The job reads the household context, the deck's names and every declined name, runs suggest_side_quests for 5 Side quests (scope: the batch id), then grounds the survivors in the model's order with Grounder.GroundMany, as many as are still wanted at a time, until 5 are kept or none are left. A Side quest no recipe grounds is dropped; each round's grounded ones are stored before the next — a dinner with status suggested, origin side_quest, grounding_status grounded with the recipe's recipe_id, photo_id, method, minutes_total and difficulty and the model's cuisine, and a pending suggestion with the name it is suggested under, the reason and cited_regular_ids — unless, since the job read its input, a dinner it repeats was added, a suggestion it repeats passed, or a Regular it cites renamed or archived (checked in the storing transaction). The job publishes {batch_id, stage, suggestion_ids, dropped} as it goes (suggesting, grounding, done). It fails with no_regulars, ai_failed (the skill or normalize_recipe failed; no Side quest is made up instead, D-017), search_not_configured or search_failed, and the batch is set failed; Side quests stored before the failure stay in the deck. If recording the batch's end fails, its job fails; the job runner retries a job's final status write with backoff until it lands, each attempt bounded at 5 seconds; at shutdown an attempt that fails or times out is not retried, and the next start fails the job as interrupted. Recording the batch's end is bounded the same way (one attempt, 5 seconds, made even during shutdown), so a busy writer cannot hold a stopping worker; a batch whose end timed out is left running with its job. Each time a batch is started, before the active batch is selected, every batch still pending or running with no job queued or running (the process stopped, or recording its end failed) is set failed, so it does not block the next. GET /api/v1/suggestions/deck returns {suggestions: [{id, dinner_id, name, photo_url, difficulty, method, minutes_total, cuisine, reason, cited_regular_ids, status, dinner_status, decided_at, created_at}], active_batch, failed_batch}: the pending suggestions whose dinner is still suggested, oldest first; the batch pending or running ({batch_id, job_id, trigger, status}, or null); and the newest batch when it failed (same shape, or null; a later batch, done or under way, supersedes the failure), read in one snapshot, so a client that did not start the batch can follow its job and learns of a failure it was not following. At most one of the two is set. POST /api/v1/suggestions/{id}/accept (Try it) sets the suggestion accepted and moves its dinner to quest_log; POST /api/v1/suggestions/{id}/decline (Pass) sets it declined and archives the dinner; every later batch, and the household context's passed list, reads the suggestion's own name as declined, so renaming the archived dinner changes nothing. Both record the session's subject as the dinner's updated_by and answer 200 {suggestion, replenish_job_id}. Repeating a decision changes nothing and answers 200; the opposite decision is 409 suggestion_decided, a suggestion whose dinner left the deck some other way 409 dinner_not_suggested, and an unknown id 404. A decision that leaves fewer than 5 in the deck starts a replenish batch, or joins the batch already pending or running, and returns that batch's job id either way (replenish_job_id is null when the deck keeps 5 or more). The batch and its job are written in the decision's own transaction, so a decision is never recorded without the replenish it calls for; when they cannot be written, neither is the decision, and a retry decides again.
• /health — liveness.
• Everything else serves the embedded PWA with SPA fallback.

AI layer

• Provider interface (ai/llm) with adapters for OpenAI-compatible, Anthropic and Ollama endpoints, called over plain HTTP — no vendor SDKs.
• Skill harness (ai/harness): prompt layering, validation of the structured output, and one repair retry; if the repair also fails the run fails — no silent fallback. Every run writes one ai_runs row when it ends, covering the repair turn too, with status ok, repaired, bad_output or provider_error; a prompt that cannot be rendered is bad_output and a provider that cannot be built is provider_error, both with no turns. The harness builds the provider itself from the settings and the decrypted API key (presets.FromSettings), so the key it redacts is always the key the provider sends. Request and response bodies are redacted before they are stored: the decrypted API key, Authorization and API-key header values, Google Chat webhook URLs and URLs with key-like query parameters are removed, inside JSON strings too; the skill, provider and model columns are redacted the same way. Writing the row is bounded: a run whose work ended in time must write its row before the skill's deadline or it fails with llm.ErrTimeout and its row records the timeout; a failed run's row has a further fixed bound, and if even that write fails the run returns the write error with its own and no row is stored. A stored row's status therefore always matches what the caller received. harness.Purge deletes rows older than harness.RunRetention (30 days), clearing the suggestion_batches and week_plans references first. The harness does not call it: the scheduler's daily ai_runs purge (Feature 20) must call harness.Purge with now - RunRetention.
• Concurrency guards (harness.Guard, one per process): harness.Run takes a scope key, and concurrent runs of one skill with one scope share a single in-flight run and its result, error included (single-flight); runs with different scopes are independent. A semaphore lets at most harness.DefaultMaxCalls (2, set by NewGuard) LLM calls run at once; waiting for a slot honours the context. Each skill declares a timeout (harness.DefaultTimeout, 60 s, unless it needs another) bounding the whole run, slot waits and repair turn included; a run past it fails with llm.ErrTimeout. A caller whose context ends gets the context error; the shared run is cancelled, freeing its slot, once no caller waits for it.
• Prompt layering (D-007): each skill version's prompt is a text/template file embedded from ai/skills/prompts/ (<skill>.v<version>.tmpl). The system prompt is always, in order: [1] the admin persona (ai_settings.system_prompt), [2] the skill's instructions, [3] the household context block, [4] the output contract with the JSON Schema — the contract is always last. The user message comes from the skill's input. checksums.txt pins every template; changing one without a version bump fails the tests.
• Household context (harness.BuildContext): layer 3 holds today's date and weekday in the household timezone, the Regulars, the Quest log, the last 60 passed Side quests and the plans of the last four ISO weeks. A character budget trims the oldest plans first, then the oldest passes; Regulars and the Quest log are never trimmed.
• Name dedupe (harness.Normalize, harness.Similar, harness.Deduper): a dinner name is normalized by lowercasing, dropping combining marks and folding precomposed letters to their base letters through a table generated from Unicode data (gen_folds.py), so composed and decomposed spellings match, stripping punctuation, dropping filler words (easy, best, homemade, quick, simple, the, a, recipe, classic) and collapsing whitespace. Two names are the same dinner when the token-set (Jaccard) similarity of their words is at least 0.85. A Deduper over the Regulars, Quest log, pending suggestions and passed names rejects a suggestion that repeats any of them.
• Side quest suggestions (skills.SuggestSideQuests, skill suggest_side_quests v1): asks for twice the Side quests needed, at the household temperature, with the household context plus the pending Side quests. Malformed replies (bad JSON, a missing field, a bad enum, an empty name) get the one repair turn. Well-formed Side quests that break a rule are dropped, not repaired, and listed in Dropped with the rule: one that repeats a Regular, Quest log dinner, pending Side quest, any passed name (the whole history, not only the 60 in the context) or an earlier Side quest of the batch; one citing no Regular or a name that is not a Regular; and one whose reason is over 180 characters or names none of its cited Regulars. Cited names are rewritten as the household writes them. Grounding each survivor in a recipe is the caller's next step.

Recipe grounding

• Dinners are grounded in real recipe pages found through recipe search (searxng or brave, per recipe_search_settings).
• Fetching is SSRF-safe (recipes.Fetcher): https:// only, at every redirect hop. Its dialer resolves the host once and refuses unless every answer is public — every non-globally-reachable IPv4 special-purpose range (loopback, RFC 1918, link-local, carrier-grade NAT, documentation TEST-NETs, benchmarking 198.18/15, multicast, reserved and more) is refused, IPv4-mapped forms included, and IPv6 must be global unicast (2000::/3) outside documentation, 6to4, Teredo and other special ranges — then dials the address it checked, so a rebinding DNS answer cannot swap in a private one. Keep-alives and environment proxies are off, so every request dials and checks afresh. At most 3 redirects; a body over 2 MB is an error, never truncated; 10 s for the whole fetch; a descriptive User-Agent; requests to one host at least 1 s apart, counted from requests actually sent (an abandoned wait holds no slot); 2xx pages cached by URL for an hour (64 pages, oldest evicted), and callers get their own copy of a cached body.
• Recipe data is parsed from schema.org Recipe JSON-LD (recipes.Extract): a small targeted scan of the page's application/ld+json scripts and og:site_name (no HTML parser dependency), finding the Recipe node at a script's top level, in a top-level array or in an @graph, with @type a string or an array of terms or absolute schema.org IRIs (https://schema.org/Recipe). An image or publisher given as an {"@id": ...} reference resolves to the node with that @id anywhere in the page's JSON-LD. The largest image (by ImageObject width × height; the first of equals) is resolved to an absolute URL; instructions — one string of lines, or a list of strings, HowToSteps and HowToSections — are flattened in order; ISO-8601 prep/cook/total times become minutes, total derived as prep + cook when only those are given; the site name is the publisher's, else og:site_name, else the host. A page with no Recipe is ErrNoRecipe, with two is ErrManyRecipes; a shape schema.org does not allow — such as a non-ISO-8601 duration like "20 minutes" or an empty one, or an image @id no node has — is ErrMalformedRecipe, never guessed at.
• Recipe search (recipes.SearchProvider: Search(ctx, query, n) → []Candidate{URL, Title, Snippet}, n 1–20) appends " recipe" to a query without that word. SearXNG is called at {recipe_search_settings.base_url}/search?q=…&format=json&categories=general — directly, not through the Fetcher, since this configured endpoint may be on the internal network; Brave calls the Brave Web Search API with the key decrypted from recipe_search_settings.api_key_ct (recipes.NewSearchProvider). Redirects are not followed; 401/403 is ErrSearchRefused, 429 ErrSearchRateLimited, other non-2xx a SearchStatusError, and a body that is not the provider's JSON (SearXNG without a results array; Brave without "type": "search" or with a web object lacking results — Brave omits web when nothing matched), over 1 MB or with a result lacking an absolute http(s) URL ErrSearchResponse.
• Ranking (recipes.Rank) fetches and extracts the top 5 candidates concurrently, rejects any whose recipe lacks ingredients or an image, and orders the rest by the token similarity of the recipe's title to the dish name (harness.Similarity, 0–1) plus a quarter for each of ingredients, image, steps and total minutes; ties keep search order. No unranked candidate is dropped silently: when some are ranked, they are returned with ErrCandidatesUnranked; when none are, the error is ErrNoUsableRecipe. Either is joined with each unranked candidate's URL and reason (fetch failure, no valid recipe, missing ingredients or image), so the caller decides per item what a failure means.
• Ingredient lines are normalized by the normalize_recipe v1 skill (skills.NormalizeRecipe), always at temperature 0 whatever the household's setting. From the title, raw ingredient lines, steps and JSON-LD times it returns {ingredients: [{name, qty, unit, note}], method, difficulty, minutes_total}. Validation requires exactly one ingredient per input line, in order (a name matching another line but not its own is out of order), each with a name; a mismatch gets the harness's repair turn. Code-derived values win: a positive JSON-LD total is minutes_total; "slow cooker" or "crock pot" in the title or a step makes the method crockpot; a difficulty the model leaves null is derived — hard over 10 steps or 90 minutes, easy at 5 steps or fewer and 45 minutes or less, else medium, a crockpot's minutes not counting.
• Photos are cached locally (photos) and processed with golang.org/x/image. recipes.PhotoCache.DownloadPhoto downloads through the Fetcher's FetchImage (JPEG, PNG, WebP or GIF content types, 8 MB cap, not cached), decodes the image (a GIF's first frame) and refuses a decoded image under 300 px on its short side, recording nothing. CachePhoto then records it in the caller's transaction: it scales the image so its long side is 1200 px and 400 px, and stores each as JPEG quality 82 at $MEALQUEST_DATA_DIR/media/photos/{id}-{size}.jpg. Images are deduplicated by the SHA-256 of the downloaded bytes; the writer's single connection serialises transactions, so one image is never recorded twice. Files written for a transaction that rolls back are removed by the caller (RemovePhotoFiles).
• Grounding (recipes.Grounder) ties these together. Ground(ctx, dishName, query) searches for the top 5 candidates and ranks them all, stored and new alike: a candidate whose source_url is already stored is scored on its stored recipe (title, ingredients, steps, times, photo source) and its page is never refetched; every other candidate is fetched and extracted. Ranking alone decides between them. It then tries each ranked candidate best first. A stored one is returned as it is, so a stored recipe is reused only when it ranks above every new candidate that grounds. A new one is grounded in this order: (1) DownloadPhoto — the download and validation step of photo caching — (2) normalize_recipe, then (3) one transaction that runs CachePhoto (scales and writes the photo files and records the photos row) and stores the recipe, ingredients and steps (an existing source_url is updated in place); files written for a rolled-back transaction are removed. It returns Grounded{recipe_id, photo_id, method, minutes_total, difficulty, source_url, site_name}. A candidate whose photo fails or whose model output is unusable (llm.ErrBadOutput) is passed over; when none grounds, the error is a typed *recipes.ErrUngroundable listing every reason (no candidates, Rank's per-candidate reasons, photo or normalize failures). Failures that are not the candidates' — search, model provider, database — are returned as they are. GroundURL(ctx, url) does the same for one pasted URL. Candidates(ctx, dishName, query, n) returns the first n of the candidates Ground would try, without grounding any. Search failures wrap recipes.ErrSearchFailed and model provider failures recipes.ErrNormalizeFailed. GroundMany grounds items 3 at a time and returns one result per item, so one failure never affects its siblings. A recipe is usable only with ingredients, an image and, if given, a positive total time.

Scheduler

Times are in the household timezone. The times of day_of_reminder (reminder_time) and rotation_check (review_time), and the day and time of suggestions_weekly, plan_draft and shopping_chat_autosend, are household settings in household_settings (dinner_time is also stored there); the table shows their defaults. week_rollover and the ai_runs purge are fixed and not configurable.

Schedule	When	Does
suggestions_weekly	Sunday 08:00	New batch of Side quests.
plan_draft	Friday 09:00	AI drafts next week's plan.
shopping_chat_autosend	Saturday 08:00	Sends the Supply run to Google Chat.
day_of_reminder	Daily 16:30	Tonight's dinner reminder.
rotation_check	Daily 09:00	Asks "Keep it in rotation?" for tried dinners.
week_rollover	Monday 00:05 (fixed)	Freezes last week's Supply run into the Supply archive.
ai_runs purge	Daily (fixed)	Calls harness.Purge to delete ai_runs rows past 30-day retention (Feature 20).

Runs are recorded in schedule_runs and executed through jobs.

Notifications

• Events: plan_ready, list_ready, day_of_reminder, new_suggestions, rotation_review; each can go to Web Push and/or Google Chat per notification_prefs.
• Delivery goes through notification_outbox.
• Web Push uses VAPID (webpush-go). Google Chat uses the stored incoming webhook.

Google Calendar

• One-way push: the app is the source of truth; edits in Google Calendar do not come back.
• Connected once with Google OAuth in Settings; one event per planned dinner.
• Deterministic event ids; each plan day records its calendar_event_id.

Frontend

• React 19, TypeScript, Vite, React Router 7, TanStack Query 5, vite-plugin-pwa, lucide-react (stroke 2.75).
• CSS Modules over tokens.css; no Tailwind, no Framer Motion, no hard-coded hex. Self-hosted Bagel Fat One and Figtree.
• Tests: Vitest, Testing Library, jsdom.
• Offline cache for the current plan, shopping list and recipes.
• Logout (POST /auth/logout) answers with Clear-Site-Data: "storage", "cache", wiping the offline marker, the service worker and its caches; the worker leaves that request to the browser, as it does every network-only one.

Route	Screen
/	Home
/onboarding	Add regular dinners
/plan	Weekly plan (Draft board)
/plan/shopping	Shopping list (Supply run)
/plan/shopping/archive	Supply archive
/discover	Swipe suggestions (Side quests)
/quick	Quick dinners
/cook-from-pantry	Cook from what I have
/dinner/:id	Recipe / dinner detail (Kitchen reading mode on tablet)
/settings	Settings home
/settings/household	Household settings
/settings/regulars	Regular dinners
/settings/calendar	Google Calendar connection
/settings/notifications	Notifications and Google Chat
/settings/ai	Admin · AI assistant

/settings/household, /settings/regulars and /settings/calendar come from CTXD; the other routes are defined in the UI handoff.

First run: while household_settings.onboarding_completed_at (read from GET /api/v1/settings/household) is null, every route redirects to /onboarding. Onboarding is a full screen outside the app shell, in three steps: the welcome (/onboarding), the Regulars (/onboarding/regulars, mock 1h, adding and archiving through the dinners API optimistically; Next waits for three saved Regulars, and a common pick is not offered once a Regular has a name harness.Similar to it — the PWA's copy of the name rules in web/src/dinners/names.ts folds letters with web/src/dinners/letterFolds.json, which gen_folds.py writes from the same table as the server's, and runs the same cases, web/src/dinners/testdata/dedupe_cases.json, as the server's) and notifications (/onboarding/notifications: what MealQuest notifies about, the iOS install hint, "Turn on notifications" and "Maybe later"). "Maybe later", and "Turn on notifications" once notifications are enabled, send PATCH /api/v1/settings/household with {"onboarding_completed": true}; the server sets onboarding_completed_at to the time of that update (keeping the first time if it is already set; the field itself is read-only and false is refused) and the app goes Home. Completing needs at least three Regulars (household.MinRegulars); with fewer the server answers 400 invalid_settings naming onboarding_completed and changes nothing. Step 3 can be reached with fewer — by its URL, or after another member removes a Regular — so it then shows the server's reason with an "Add Regulars" button back to step 2. Notification permission is never asked for on page load; until Feature 19 wires Web Push, "Turn on notifications" asks for nothing and says plainly that notifications are not on yet, offering "Finish setting up" (which completes onboarding as above) instead of a silent success. Offline on the saved pages the settings cannot be read (the service worker never caches /api/v1/settings), so the saved pages open as they are.

Regular dinners (/settings/regulars) lists the Regulars from GET /api/v1/dinners?status=regular, each with its photo, "method · minutes", favorite heart and grounding badge ("Finding recipe…" while pending, "Recipe found" when grounded or manual, "Needs a recipe" when failed). The add field takes a name or a pasted https:// recipe link. Tapping a Regular opens an edit sheet (name, method, minutes, difficulty; remove archives it after a confirmation); tapping one that needs a recipe opens "Fix recipe" (pick one of the recipe candidates, paste a link or type the ingredients and steps in). Adds, removals and the heart show at once and are undone if the server refuses them. While any Regular is pending, the list is read again every 3 seconds (not while a change is in flight), and polling stops once none is.

Boundaries and gotchas

• Secrets never reach the client — API keys, OAuth tokens and the Chat webhook stay server-side, encrypted at rest.
• The app is the source of truth for the plan; Google Calendar is a one-way mirror.
• Never auto-promote to Regular (D-021).
• Quick means cooked in a crock pot or ≤ 30 minutes prep to table.
• Weeks run Monday–Sunday in the household timezone.
• No silent fallbacks — fail fast and report.
• iOS Web Push requires the PWA to be installed to the Home Screen; show an install hint.