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Comment by ben_w

8 months ago

> The LLM work sounds dumb, and the suggestion that it made "a qr code generator" is disingenuous. The LLM barely did a frontend for it. Barely.

Yes, and?

The goal wasn't "write me a QR library" it was "here's my pain point, solve it".

> It sounds like the author payed for `npm install`, and thinks he's on top of things and being smart.

I can put this another way if you prefer:

  Running `npm install qrious`: trivial.
  Knowing qrious exists and how to integrate it into a page: expensive.

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/know-where-man/

> > Built with Aider and either Sonnet 3.5 or Gemini 2.5 Pro

> Paid tools.

I get Sonnet 4 for free at https://claude.ai — I know version numbers are weird in this domain, but I kinda expect that means Sonnet 3.5 was free at some point? Was it not? I mean, 3.7 is also a smaller version number but listed as "pro", so IDK…

Also I get Gemini 2.5 Pro for free at https://aistudio.google.com

Just out of curiosity, I've just tried using Gemini 2.5 Pro (for free) myself to try this. The result points to a CDN of qrcodejs, which I assume is this, but don't know my JS libraries so can't confirm this isn't just two different ones with the same name: https://github.com/davidshimjs/qrcodejs

My biggest issue with this kind of thing in coding is the same as my problem with libraries in general: you're responsible for the result even if you don't read what the library (/AI) is doing. So, I expect some future equivalent of the npm left-pad incident — memetic monoculture, lots of things fail at the same time.

6 comments

ben_w

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alganet  8 months ago

> Knowing qrious exists and how to integrate it into a page: expensive.

qrious literally has it integrated already:

https://github.com/davidshimjs/qrcodejs/blob/master/index.ht...

I see many issues. The main one is that none of this is relevant to the qemu discussion. It's on another whole level of project.

I kind of regret asking the poor guy to show his stuff. None of these tutorial projects come even close to what an AI contribution to qemu would look like. It's pointless.

  • TeMPOraL  8 months ago

    Person in question here.

    I didn't know qrious exist. Last time I checked for frontend-only QR code generators myself, pre-AI, I couldn't find anything useful. I don't do frontend work daily, I'm not on top of the garbagefest the JS environment is.

    Probably half the win applying AI to this project was that it a) discovered qrious for me, and b) made me a working example frontend, in less time than it would take me to find the library myself among sea of noise.

    'ben_w is absolutely correct when he wrote:

    > The goal wasn't "write me a QR library" it was "here's my pain point, solve it".

    And:

      <quote>
  Running `npm install qrious`: trivial.
  Knowing qrious exists and how to integrate it into a page: expensive.
  </quote>

    This is precisely what it was. I built this in between other stuff, paying half attention to it, to solve an immediate need my wife had. The only thing I cared about it here is that:

    1. It worked and was trivial to use

    2. Was 100% under my control, to guarantee no tracking, telemetry, ads, crypto miners, and other usual web dangers, are present, and ensure they never are going to be present.

    3. It had no build step whatsoever, and minimal dependencies that could be vendored, because again, I don't do webshit for a living and don't have time for figuring out this week's flavor of building "Hello world" in Node land.

    (Incidentally, I'm using Claude Code to build something bigger using a web stack, which forced me to figure out the current state of tooling, and believe me, it's not much like what I saw 6 months ago, and nothing like what I saw a year ago.)

    2 and 3 basically translate to "I don't want to ever think about it again". Zero ops is my principle :).

    ----

    > I see many issues. The main one is that none of this is relevant to the qemu discussion. It's on another whole level of project.

    It was relevant to the topic discussed in this subthread. Specifically about the statement:

    > But there are also local tools generated faster than you could adjust existing tools to do what you want. I'm running 3 things now just for myself that I generated from scratch instead of trying to send feature requests to existing apps I can buy.

    The implicit point of larger importance is: AI contributions may not show up fully polished in OSS repos, but making it possible to do throwaway tools to address pain points directly provides advantages that compound.

    And my examples are just concrete examples of projects that were AI generated with a mindset of "solve this pain point" and not "build a product", and making them took less time and effort than my participation in this discussion already did.

  • ben_w  8 months ago

    The very first part of the quotation is "Knowing qrious exists".

    So the fact they've already got the example is great if you do in fact already have that knowledge, and *completely useless* if you don't.

    > I kind of regret asking the poor guy to show his stuff. None of these tutorial projects come even close to what an AI contribution to qemu would look like. It's pointless.

    For better and worse, I suspect it's very much the kind of thing AI would contribute.

    I also use it for things, and it's… well, I have seen worse code from real humans, but I don't think highly of those humans' coding skills. The AI I've used so far are solidly at the quality level of "decent for a junior developer", not more, not less. Ridiculously broad knowledge (which is why that quality level is even useful), but that quality level.

    Use it because it's cheap or free, when that skill level is sufficient. Unless there's a legal issue, which there is for qemu, in which case don't.