Comment by Antibabelic
1 month ago
Whatever happened to just typing "apt install qrencode"? It's definitely "fast, reliable, free of surveillance economy bullshit, and doesn't employ URL shorteners".
1 month ago
Whatever happened to just typing "apt install qrencode"? It's definitely "fast, reliable, free of surveillance economy bullshit, and doesn't employ URL shorteners".
You need to know "qrencode" exists under that exact name. Claude already knows about it and how to use it.
Sure, but that's entirely different from vibe-coding a tool, which sounds like a colossal waste of resources.
Having an LLM spit out a few hundred lines of HTML and JavaScript is not a colossal waste of resources, it's equivalent to running a microwave for a couple of seconds.
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as long as that wast and the associated cost is heavily subsidized as it is today, nobody will care
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Users can't use command–line tools. They just can't. It has to be user–friendly or it doesn't exist.
It's not even "users", just the user. Nice thing about LLMs is that it's cheap to develop small tools tailor-made for audience of few, or in this case, just one.
1) This was for my wife. She is not proficient in Linux or CLI in general, and (like ~all white collar workers these days) works almost exclusively in browser tools (exception being pre-O365 versions of Word and Excel we keep running on her laptop because she prefers them).
2) I never heard of `qrencode` CLI tool until today. For some reason I didn't even consider it might exist (maybe because last time I checked, which was many years ago, there was none).
3) Notably, no one mentioned it the last time I shared this story on HN - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44385049.
4) Even if I knew about it, I'd still have to build a web frontend for it, and I'd need a proper server for it, which I'd then have to maintain properly, and secure it against the `qrencode` call becoming an attack vector.
So frankly, for my specific problem, my solution is strictly better.
A "static, single-page client-side tool" is so much better than "Step 1: install Linux..."