feast-timeline-conductor

Feast Timeline Conductor

Overview

Every host knows the disaster: turkey still resting, potatoes boiling over, the gratin went in late, and dinner "at 19:00" becomes 20:15 with cold sides. The problem is not cooking skill — it is scheduling. A holiday meal is a resource-constrained project (one oven, four burners, two hands) that people run from memory.

This skill turns a dish list into a backward-scheduled timeline anchored to your serve time:

1. Every dish gets stages prep → cook → rest, laid out backwards from the serve time, using each dish's hold window as slack.
2. Oven as a shared resource — dishes co-bake only if temperatures are within 25°F and shelf capacity allows; conflicting dishes are shifted earlier into their hold slack automatically.
3. Burner capacity — limited slots, same greedy resolution.
4. Make-ahead detection — dishes marked make_ahead move to a "day-before" list instead of competing on the day.
5. Hands-busy audit — if two prep tasks collide, you are told before you're standing there with two knives.
6. Feasibility check — if the serve time is impossible, the earliest feasible time is computed instead of a silently broken plan.

When to Use

• "Dinner is at 19:00, I have 7 dishes, one oven — when does everything go in?"
• Planning a holiday meal (Thanksgiving, Christmas, Easter, Eid, Seder)
• Dinner parties where dishes have different oven temperatures
• "Can I still serve at 18:30 if I start now?" → feasibility check
• Deciding what to make ahead the day before

Don't use for: single-dish cooking, industrial kitchens, or dishes you can't describe with prep/cook/rest minutes. It schedules; it does not cook.

Quick Start

# 1. Generate a sample dishes.json to copy from
python3 scripts/feast.py example --out dishes.json

# 2. Get the full timeline for a 19:00 serve
python3 scripts/feast.py plan --serve 19:00 --dishes dishes.json

# 3. ...when you're starting later than planned
python3 scripts/feast.py plan --serve 19:00 --dishes dishes.json --now 15:40

# 4. Different kitchen: 3 shelves, 6 burners
python3 scripts/feast.py plan --serve 18:30 --dishes dishes.json --shelves 3 --burners 6

The Dish File

[
  {
    "name": "Roast turkey",
    "prep_min": 30,
    "cook_min": 180,
    "rest_min": 45,
    "equipment": "oven",
    "temp_f": 350,
    "hold_min": 20,
    "shelves": 2
  },
  {
    "name": "Green bean casserole",
    "prep_min": 15,
    "cook_min": 35,
    "rest_min": 10,
    "equipment": "oven",
    "temp_f": 375,
    "hold_min": 15,
    "shelves": 1
  },
  {
    "name": "Mashed potatoes",
    "prep_min": 25,
    "cook_min": 30,
    "equipment": "burner",
    "rest_min": 0,
    "hold_min": 30
  }
]

• temp_f optional; oven dishes without temps are treated as temperature-agnostic (co-bake with anything).
• hold_min = how long the finished dish stays good. This is your slack — the scheduler consumes it to resolve conflicts.
• make_ahead: true → dish is moved to the day-before list entirely.

How Scheduling Works

1. Sort dishes by cook time descending (the big roast claims its slot first).
2. Latest cook end = serve + hold − rest. Work backwards from there.
3. An oven slot is valid during [start, start+cook] only if, at every minute, either the oven is free, or every co-baking dish's temperature is within 25°F and total shelves ≤ capacity.
4. If the latest slot conflicts, slide the start earlier minute-by-minute (into hold slack) until it fits.
5. Prep is laid immediately before the cook start, so knife-work naturally staggers across dishes.
6. After scheduling, prep windows are pairwise-checked for overlap — overlapping hands-on work is flagged as a conflict warning, not silently accepted.
7. If any prep would have to start before --now, the plan is infeasible; the tool searches forward (5-minute steps) for the earliest feasible serve time and reports it.

Common Pitfalls

1. Optimistic hold times. A soufflé has ~0 min hold; a braised dish has 60+. If you lie in hold_min, the scheduler happily builds a plan that ruins food. Be honest per dish.
2. Forgetting rest matters. Big roasts need 20–45 min rest, which is free scheduling space — another dish can finish the oven in that window.
3. Two things at ±300°F cannot co-bake. The 25°F tolerance is real physics of doneness, not bureaucracy. Dishes far apart in temperature must be sequenced, and the tool sequences them.
4. Prep collisions. If the plan says you're dicing onions while whipping cream at 18:05, the warning is the plan working — move one prep earlier by hand or simplify a dish.
5. Not using make_ahead. Cranberry sauce, stock, pies, and casseroles assembled ahead don't belong in day-of competition at all.

Verification Checklist

• Every dish appears in the timeline exactly once (plus rest/serve lines)
• No oven interval over capacity or over temp tolerance
• Prep windows don't overlap (or warnings are acknowledged)
• Everything lands within [serve, serve + hold] of its own window
• If --now was given, the plan starts in the future

One-Shot Recipes

Classic Thanksgiving for 8, serve 18:00:

python3 scripts/feast.py example --out dishes.json
python3 scripts/feast.py plan --serve 18:00 --dishes dishes.json --now 09:00

Two-oven household: run twice with different dish files, or set --shelves 4 and let co-baking rules approximate it.

"When could I possibly serve?" — drop --serve, add --now:

python3 scripts/feast.py plan --dishes dishes.json --now 16:00

The tool reports the earliest feasible serve time for that start.