You better check the code, mate. The meat of what most of it does is a one liner calling jsQR or some other imported lib to do the real work. I am not exaggerating in the slightest.

You sound so ridiculously defensive. It's pathetic.

Dude. I don't judge my knowledge after the answer is given to me. If I was the junior programmer assigned to the author and they were having this chat with me I am telling you as a beginner I wouldn't be able to do it.

Of course if you show me the answers I will think I can do it easy, because answers in programming are always easy (good answers anyways). It's the process of finding the answer that is hard. And I'm not a bad programmer either, I'm at least mediocre, I'm just unfamiliar with web technology.

I am of the firm believe that you can put "JavaScript scan qr code" in a search engine and arrive at your goal. The answers range from libraries to code snippets basically the same as those created by Claude. Using the same libraries. I feel like googling every step would be faster than trying to get it right with LLMs, but that is a different point.

I've seen a complete no-code person install whisper x with a virtual Python environment and use it for realtime speech to text in their Japanese lessons, in less than 3 hours. You can do a simple library call in JavaScript.

"I feel like googling every step would be faster than trying to get it right with LLMs"

Why don't you give that a go? See if you can knock out a QR code reading UI in JavaScript in less than 3 minutes, complete with drag-and-drop file opening support.

(I literally built this one in a separate browser tab while I was actively taking notes in a meeting)

I say three minutes because my first message in https://gist.github.com/simonw/c2b0c42cd1541d6ed6bfe5c17d638... was at 2:45pm and the final reply from Claude was at 2:47pm.

Should probably add some time for finding the correct url for the jsqr library, since the LLM didn’t do that for you.

Yeah, add another minute for that. It was pretty easy to spot - I got a 404, so I searched jsdelivr for jsqr and dropped that in instead.

That gist is pretty close to what I’ve been looking for; thank you! Examples of a chat session that resulted in a usable project are /very/ helpful. Unfortunately, the gist demonstrates, to me at least, that the models don’t know enough about the languages I wish to use.

Those prompts might be sufficient enough to result in deployable HTML/JS code comprised of a couple hundred lines of code but that’s fairly trivial in my definition. I’m not trying to be rude or disrespectful to you; within my environment, non-trivial projects typically involve an entire microservice doing even mildly interesting business logic and offering some kind of API or integration with another, similarly non-trivial API—usually both. And they’re typically built on languages that are compiled either to libraries/executables or they’re compiled to bytecode for the JVM/CLR.

Again, I’m not trying to be disrespectful. You’ve built some really great stuff and I appreciate you sharing your experiences; I wish I knew some of the things you do—you keep writing about your experiences and I’ll keep reading ‘em, we can learn together. The problem is that I’m beginning to recognize that these models are perhaps not nearly ready for the kinds of work I want or need to do, and I’m feeling a bit bummed that the capabilities the industry currently touts are significantly more overhyped than I’d imagined.

Here's a larger example where I had Claude build me a full Django application: https://simonwillison.net/2024/Aug/8/django-http-debug/

I have a bunch more larger projects on my blog: https://simonwillison.net/tags/ai-assisted-programming/

I do a whole lot of API integration work with Claude, generally by pasting in curl examples to illustrate the API. Here's an example from this morning: https://til.simonwillison.net/llms/prompt-gemini

> You can do a simple library call in JavaScript.

But it's more than that, isn't it? It has a whole interface, drag and drop functionality etc. Front end code is real code mate.

Barely. These are all standard features. I've done this. You can see in the code how easy it is. These examples aren't complex.

I don't know why you are so insistant on this while not being a beginner. Specially when a real beginner is telling you their personal experience.

https://xkcd.com/2501/

I don't use javascript at all. I'm essentially beginner level with it. And i've seen people build more complex projects in classes myself.

The project i see people build in Java classes on the other hand is a CLI version of Battleships. And honestly that is more complex than the presented projects solved by Claude.

Your personal experience is one point of many. That these projects seem hard to you doesn't make it so for the average person. When i say "a beginner can do it", there's bound to be some who can't. I'm sorry, if these projects take you weeks that is a problem.

It just feels like you have taken a stance that this is useless and anything anyone says or does is not going to dissuade you from it. There are several people who are pointing out up and down this thread several different projects to you built in short times, but you keep saying nothing is impressive to you. To be very honest, this behavior is irritating.