ElanoryaDrink Buddy
Nothing looks at the photograph to decide what you are drinking
There is no recognition step. You pick, from a catalogue of twenty-five generic drinks and a curated set of commercial products, and the rules about what may be selected are stricter than they first appear — particularly about when the answer is allowed to be nothing.
Two layers, one of them compulsory
Identity is stored in two parts. The generic drink — coffee, red wine, tap water — is always present and always singular. The commercial product is optional, and the honest answer is usually that there is not one.
That split is what makes manual selection fast. You are not being asked to find a specific bottle in a database; you are being asked which of twenty-five things was in the glass, and then given the option to be more precise if the packaging happens to be in front of you.
The four cases the rules name explicitly
These are written down as required behaviour rather than left to whoever builds the next screen.
| What is in front of you | Required outcome |
|---|---|
| Wine in a glass | Generic red, white or rosé. No product. A brand is never invented to fill the gap |
| Water in a glass | Generic water, and the product picker is not offered at all |
| An opaque mug you cannot see into | No guess. The identity falls to unknown and you choose by hand |
| No drink in the frame | A check-in with no drink is never published |
What happened to automatic recognition
It was designed, costed, and then cancelled in full. No provider is enabled, no credential exists, and the spend ceiling is zero. The mock classifier left in the codebase is not called by anything.
The reasoning is worth reading as a general principle rather than a budget note. The product had already committed to manual selection always being available and never being presented as a failure state. Taken to its conclusion, that commitment makes the zero-recognition path the only path — and what was designed as a resilience property became the architecture.
There is a recorded condition for revisiting it: a measured complaint about manual-selection burden, plus an absolute monthly spend ceiling chosen and enforced as a hard stop first. Neither a date nor an intention is attached to that, so none is implied here.
What a curated catalogue means in practice
One person maintains it. That has consequences worth knowing before you go looking for your usual bottle.
You judge the app by whether your specific product is listed.
Judge it by whether the generic is right, because that is the field every feature reads. Statistics, streaks and the feed all work from the generic.
You submit a correction expecting it to improve the catalogue for everyone.
Corrections change your check-in only. There is no submission path and no automatic learning, which is a deliberate limit rather than an unbuilt feature.
You expect alcohol-by-volume figures in the catalogue to feed a calculation.
They are reference values and are barred from one specific use: they are never an input to a blood-alcohol estimate. That prohibition is recorded as a decision, not a convention.
What this page does not decide
Named so the silence is not mistaken for an answer.
- Which specific products are in the catalogue on any given day. That is curation, it changes, and listing it here would go stale immediately.
- Whether recognition will return. A condition is recorded; no date, provider or intention is.
- How the two photographs are used, given that neither is analysed.
- What the statistics do with the generic once it is chosen.
Questions
Does the app recognise my drink from the photo?
No. Automatic recognition was cancelled in full — no provider is enabled, no credential exists, no call is made. You pick the drink by hand, and neither photograph is analysed by anything.
Why can I not find my exact bottle?
The product catalogue is curated by one person, with no user submissions and nothing learning from corrections. Most check-ins are expected to carry a generic drink and no product, which is a complete entry rather than an incomplete one.
Can I scan a barcode instead?
No, and it is not planned. Turning a bottle around to scan it is a cashier interaction rather than a social one, and the primary cases — a glass of wine, a cocktail, a tap water — have no barcode at all.
I picked the wrong drink. Can I fix it?
Yes, for twenty-four hours after publishing. The drink identity and the caption stay editable in that window; the photographs do not, and deleting the check-in would cost you a daily slot.