Using ChatGPT via gptel to make my Emacs nutrition tracker smarter
Introduction
Back in April 2020 I shared how I built a nutrition tracker in Emacs that leveraged org-capture templates and or-ql to record foods, recipes, and meals. At that time, I relied on an org-mode based database and manual updates to keep track of calories, protein, carbs, and fat. While the system worked, maintaining that data was both tedious and error-prone. Each time I needed to insert a new food, I had to do an internet search to find the nutritional information and then manually update my org-mode files.
Intro
A couple of weeks ago I came across Roberto Carratalla’s blog post on Function calling on OpenShift AI. At the time I was preparing for RedHat Summit Connect Zurich 2025 where I was meant to run a workshop on Quarkus and Langchain4j with Kyra Goud, Dimitris Andreadis and Codrin Bucur. We had an issue however, related to enabling functions on OpenShift AI.
Roberto pointed us to the blog post, but I couldn’t spot what I was doing wrong. So, I decided to port the examples in the blog post to Java to make sure that I was comparing apples to apples.