Tutorial: Scheduling and long-work recipes

Required reading

Read 00-recipe-protocol.md through Then tighten the same prompt, paying attention to serve-target-time and meal-prep-brief. Skim The complete protocol so you see how recipe-step aggregates into recipe-steps.

What this enhances in the recipe prompt

The plain recipe prompt already asks the assistant to respect a target serve time and to work backward for long waits. Models often:

  • flatten timing into narrative (“meanwhile…”) without explicit ordering,
  • ignore wall-clock anchors when the user changes pace mid-session, or
  • fail to connect stages (prep vs finishing) to the phase vocabulary.

This continuation makes schedule constraints explicit without inventing a full solver—just named facts that must cohere with recipe-step ordinals.

New capability: serve targets and stage hooks

Introduce relations that would make sense as columns if you stored them:

  • serve-target-time(?t) — already in the README; keep it grounded (ISO string, or a human label the user and assistant agree to treat as canonical for the session).
  • recipe-stage(?ordinal, ?title, ?timeHint) — larger chunks than a single step: “Day before”, “Two hours out”, “Last fifteen minutes”.

Then relate steps to stages only as needed—either by ranges of step ordinals in prose or with a lightweight predicate such as step-in-stage(?stepOrdinal, ?stageOrdinal) if you want maximum auditability.

Example rules block

stages([& ?so ?st ?th]) <- recipe-stage(?so, ?st, ?th)

scheduled-brief(?serve, ?stages, ?steps)
  <- serve-target-time(?serve),
     stages(?stages),
     recipe-steps(?steps)

If you do not yet collect explicit stages, omit recipe-stage and keep scheduled-brief as serve-target-time + recipe-steps—still enough to query “what time pressure you think applies.”

Query shapes

What serve time are you using?
%t(?x) <- serve-target-time(?x)

List stages you believe apply (ordinal, title).
%st(?rows) <- stages(?rows)

When the model’s schedule disagrees with the user’s clock, the bug is often in underspecified prose (“around dinner”) rather than in RPL mechanics.

When “feasibility” is genuinely modal (“if the oven is free by 17:00, this works”), you may eventually use the patterns in ../specification/logics.md. This tutorial stays at one advanced feature: explicit time and stage hooks on the same recipe artifact you already built in 00-recipe-protocol.md.

Where to go next