Building OopsCalorie: When Your AI Thinks Dinuguan Is Champorado 😂

I’ve been building a side project called OopsCalorie , an AI-powered calorie and meal tracking app. The idea sounded simple enough: User logs or takes a photo of their food. AI identifies the meal. Estimate calories and macros. Save the entry. Done. Simple, right? Well... Then we started testing it with Filipino food. 😂 AI Meets Filipino Food 🇵🇭 One of the funniest parts of building OopsCalorie has been testing the food recognition. At one point, our AI confidently looked at dinuguan and decided: That's champorado. Okay. I can kind of see where you were coming from. Both are dark, both can be served in a bowl... But still. 😂 Then came bagnet . AI: Lumpiang Shanghai. Bro. Not even close. 😂 These bugs are funny, but they also exposed one of the more interesting engineering problems behind OopsCalorie: Image recognition is only the first step. Correctly identifying a meal — especially regional dishes — requires much more context than I initially expected. The Real Problem Isn't Just Calories When I started the project, I thought the difficult part would be estimating calories. Turns out, before you can estimate: You need to know what the food actually is. And food can be surprisingly ambiguous from an image. A photo might contain: multiple dishes sauces hiding ingredients visually similar foods regional dishes that aren't well represented in training data different cooking methods unknown portion sizes ingredients completely hidden underneath other ingredients Even humans sometimes need context. "Is that pork adobo or humba?" "Is that fried pork belly or bagnet?" Now imagine asking an AI to determine that from pixels alone. Building Around AI Instead of Blindly Trusting It This changed how I'm approaching the system. Instead of treating the AI response as absolute truth, OopsCalorie is evolving toward a workflow where AI provides an intelligent estimate while the user still has the ability to provide context and correct it. We're experimenting with things like: Image +