Application to view virtual reality on QR Code

This app reads a QR code with the phone camera and draws an image on top of the marker, so the screen shows a model standing on a printed code. Cline and AIDE wrote most of the code.

Tools and approach

• MODEL: Qwen2.5 Coder 32B Instruct
• TOOLS: AIDE, Cline
• SETUP: the QR marker has to be generated with a third-party tool before the app can be tested

Review

THE GOOD: It worked — the phone tracked the marker and the image sat on top of it.

THE BAD: The VR library it depended on is no longer maintained, so the demo cannot run today. It only worked on the phone, and getting the QR code right meant leaving the app for another tool.

TO IMPROVE: Rebuild the tracking on a different JavaScript library that is still maintained, and use a current model to rewrite the code the old one produced.

What we learned

A project can stop working without anyone breaking it. Nothing was wrong with the code we wrote — the piece we did not write retired underneath it. That is worth reading even with the demo gone: the useful question when picking a library is not only “does this work today” but “who is still maintaining it next year”. It is also the first project here where the interesting failure was outside the model’s control: a newer model cannot fix an abandoned dependency, it can only replace it.

Demo: no longer available (dependency abandoned). Kept as a record of the approach and the lesson.