You need to know "qrencode" exists under that exact name. Claude already knows about it and how to use it.

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.

Not to mention, my little tool is using much less electricity running than just about anything else I could easily find on-line, simply by the virtue of being minimal, and completely free of superfluous visual bullshit, upsells, tracking, telemetry, and other such secondary aspects of anything people publish and advertise for others to use.

as long as that wast and the associated cost is heavily subsidized as it is today, nobody will care

Don't get the anti-AI propaganda get to you too much. Inference is cheap on the margin.

Consider: there are models capable (if barely) of doing this job, that you can run locally, on a upper-mid-range PC with high-end consumer GPU. Take that as a baseline, assume it takes a day instead of an hour because of inference speed, tally up total electricity cost. It's not much. Won't boil oceans any more than people playing AAA video games all day will.

Sure, the big LLMs from SOTA vendors use more GPUs/TPUs for inference, but this means they finish much faster. Plus, commercial vendors have lots of optimizations (batch processing, large caches, etc.), and data centers are much more power-efficient than your local machine, so "how much it'd cost me in power bill if I did it locally" is a good starting estimate.

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..."