Manifesto
You sit down. The menu comes. You have no idea.
Makan is for right then.
Every other food app helped you get this far. They rank places. Four and a half stars, two thousand reviews, so you came. Good. But now you are sitting down, there are twenty things on the menu, and not one of those stars tells you which one to eat.
So you do what everybody does. You pick the safe thing. Or you copy your friend. And sometimes the plate arrives and you know straight away that you should have had what she ordered.
Makan starts here. At the table, with the menu open.
It looks at what you have eaten before. Not what you said about it. What you really chose, and ate, and finished.
Then it looks at this menu and finds the thing closest to what you already love. And it tells you why. You picked the grilled one over the fried one, four times out of five. You can argue with that. You should be able to.
All of that comes from something small. Every time you eat something, you save it. A photo. Where you were. That is it.
Later, Makan shows you two of your own meals and asks one question: which would you order again first?
No stars. No score. Just pick one. Do that a few times and Makan knows something no review site can ever know. Not what a crowd liked. What you go back for.
Sometimes it will not know.
Maybe nobody has eaten here yet. Maybe nothing you have saved is anything like this menu. When that happens Makan will say so, and tell you which of the two it is. Then you can ask the waiter, or just order what you fancy.
It will not pretend. A guess dressed up as an answer is worse than no answer, because you only find out when the food is already in front of you.
Then the food comes, and you eat it.
That is the good part, and not only because you are hungry. You just learned something. Save it, and next time Makan can hold it up against something else and ask you which one you would go back to.
AI has never tasted food.
It cannot smell. It cannot chew. It does not remember being hungry as a kid. So it will never tell you a dish is good, never write your memories for you, never make up an opinion you did not have. Tasting is the human bit, and it stays yours.
What it does is recognise. It can see that two of your own photos are the same dish, so Makan can tell you: you have eaten this before, and here is what you thought of it. Your photos, nobody else's. Recognising, not judging.
None of this came out of a meeting.
It started in COVID. I could not see my friends, so a few of us made a Snapchat story and posted our dinners. Breakfast. Nasi bungkus on the way home. Three hundred people joined without us asking anyone.
Six years. Thousands of meals. And here is what we learned from it.
We had all of it saved. We could scroll back and see exactly what each of us went back for. But every time one of us sat down somewhere new, none of it helped. We stared at the menu and ordered the safe thing anyway.
Keeping the meals was never the point. The meals were for this.
So if you already use Makan to remember your food, nothing is going away. Your meals are still yours, still private unless you share them. They just have a job now.
You finish. You pay. You walk out. And the next time you sit down somewhere new and somebody hands you a menu, you will not be starting from nothing.
If you have ever read a menu twice and still ordered the safe thing, this is for you.
— Devon
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