The problem
Making weight is not a diet. It is a deadline. Every combat athlete knows the shape of a bad camp: a plan built on a number that was never realistic, a last week of dehydration to cover the gap, and a fighter who steps into the cage having left their power on the scale. The tools on the market make it worse, because a generic calorie app will happily prescribe a deficit no sports physician would sign off on.
Fighter Cut is a Frenchy Digital product, founded by Chris Machetto, and it started from a simple rule: the software should refuse to plan a cut that hurts the athlete. On the other side of the mat, coaches were texting a dozen fighters every Sunday to ask how camp was going. The Corner exists so nobody has to be texted.
The design constraints we set ourselves
- Safety limits in the engine, not the UI: Every diet week capped at a 750 kcal deficit. Weekly loss graded safe at or under 1.5% of bodyweight, caution to 2%, unsafe above. Intake floors of 1,500 kcal for men and 1,200 for women.
- Honesty over a number: If the target cannot be reached safely, the app prints the shortfall and says so. The water cut is sized, at 3% by default, and handed to a professional. The app will not walk anyone through a sauna.
- No AI coach: A fighter's body is not a place for a model to improvise. Every recommendation is deterministic, testable and explainable.
- Private by default: No account is required. Data stays on the device unless the athlete joins a gym, and even then food logs never leave.
Where AI fits, and where it deliberately does not
There is no AI in the product. The athlete app makes zero AI API calls, and the App Store listing says "No AI coach" on purpose. The supplement intelligence is a rule engine over structured data, so a new rule is a data change, not a code change. The comparator scores labels deterministically. What AI did shape is how the product was built: both repositories were developed with Claude Code against a written engineering contract, which is how a five-phase planning engine, a 3D body model, a labelled supplement catalog and a second coach app shipped to TestFlight in under four weeks.
How we built it
Two apps, one backend, two philosophies
Fighter Cut: local-first
The Corner: server-owned
Engines you can test
Every number the app shows comes out of a pure function in an engines directory: basal metabolic rate, total daily energy expenditure, macros, the cut plan, projections, goals, body composition, the supplement comparator, readiness and a fasting state machine. Each is unit-tested in isolation. The charts are hand-rolled SVG, and even the barcodes on the label panels are rendered from first principles rather than pulled from a dependency.
What shipped
Timeline
- 9 August 2026: First commit of the athlete app.
- 24 August 2026: The Corner started as a separate repo on the shared backend.
- Late August 2026: Both apps in App Store Connect, internal TestFlight live, external beta group submitted for review. corner.fightercut.com live on the web.
- 1 October 2026: Compiled-in launch instant when paid gating arms.
Problems worth talking about
A body model from tape
Labels that agree with themselves
Coaches landing in the wrong app
Keeping the admin console out of the binary
Where it stands
Beta, reported honestly
Fighter Cut and Fight Corner are on TestFlight with public release gated to October 2026. The numbers on this page are counts from the codebase: foods, products, brands, articles, safety thresholds. We do not publish downloads, active users, gyms or revenue for an app that has not launched, and this page will be updated when it has.
Making weight is not a diet. It is a deadline.
— Fighter Cut App Store listing
What This Project Does Well
Technologies Used
React 19, Vite, TypeScript, Dexie (IndexedDB), Zustand with persistence, Capacitor 8 for iOS, hand-rolled SVG charts, Supabase (Postgres, Auth, RLS) for accounts, clubs and billing, RevenueCat Web Billing, Stripe, Cloudflare Pages, TestFlight and App Store Connect API automation
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