I learned how to build an AI wrapper by shipping a real app

I'm not an AI researcher. I'm a backend developer with 16 years of Laravel and PHP experience who wanted to build something with AI. So I did what made sense — I built a real app. The idea Simple Plate is an AI recipe generator. Tell it what ingredients you have, your dietary preferences and cuisine mood, and it generates three recipe ideas for you. Simple problem. Simple solution. What I didn't expect was how much I'd learn about working with AI APIs by actually shipping something r...