[TeMPOraL]

> Vendors of small utilities could be in trouble. For example I needed to cut out some pages from a pdf. I could have found a tool online(I’m sure there are several), write one myself. However, Claude quickly performed the task.

Definitely. Making small, single-purpose utilities with LLMs is almost as easy these days as googling for them on-line - much easier, in fact, if you account for time spent filtering out all the malware, adware, "to finish the process, register an account" and plain broken "tools" that dominate SERP.

Case in point, last time my wife needed to generate a few QR codes for some printouts for an NGO event, I just had LLM make one as a static, single-page client-side tool and hosted it myself -- because that was the fastest way to guarantee it's fast, reliable, free of surveillance economy bullshit, and doesn't employ URL shorteners (surprisingly common pattern that sometimes becomes a nasty problem down the line; see e.g. a high-profile case of some QR codes on food products leading to porn sites after shortlink got recycled).

[Antibabelic]

Whatever happened to just typing "apt install qrencode"? It's definitely "fast, reliable, free of surveillance economy bullshit, and doesn't employ URL shorteners".

[senko]

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

[Antibabelic]

Sure, but that's entirely different from vibe-coding a tool, which sounds like a colossal waste of resources.

[simonw]

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.

[TeMPOraL]

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.

[agos]

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

[TeMPOraL]

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.

[direwolf20]

Users can't use command–line tools. They just can't. It has to be user–friendly or it doesn't exist.

[TeMPOraL]

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.

[TeMPOraL]

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.

[simonw]

A "static, single-page client-side tool" is so much better than "Step 1: install Linux..."