Profiled the second model call visible in modelUsage: it is
`source=generate_session_title`, inventing a title for a session that
--no-session-persistence immediately discards. It costs no wall time —
both requests dispatch ~1ms apart and run concurrently, which is why
duration_api_ms was roughly double duration_ms — but it spent 507 input
tokens against 153 for the actual question.
--name qs-ask removes it: one request instead of two, 660 input tokens
down to 153 per question. No latency change, 77% less input token spend,
which is what actually matters when the budget is a subscription rate
limit rather than a bill.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Profiled where the ~6s actually went, and it was not where I assumed.
Haiku defaults to extended thinking, so it spent 225 output tokens and
1.9s deliberating before emitting an 80-character answer about the height
of a tower. MAX_THINKING_TOKENS=0: 43 output tokens, time-to-first-text
2657ms -> 1122ms, wall clock 5.7s -> ~2.4s, answer unchanged.
Two things measured NOT to be the bottleneck, recorded in the comment so
nobody optimises them later: process startup (0.12s boot plus 28ms to
fire the request, so a warm/persistent process saves nothing) and prompt
size (184 input tokens, no bloat to trim).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
No API key and no separate billing: qs-ask now shells out to `claude -p`,
which draws on the existing subscription already authenticated on this
host. The trade is latency — Claude Code boots a Node process per
question, ~6s measured against the raw API's ~1s — so the launcher now
races Wikipedia and Claude instead of chaining them. Wikipedia fills the
card in under a second and Claude supersedes it on arrival; chaining
would have left the card blank for six seconds on every question.
Isolation, verified: --safe-mode drops CLAUDE.md, skills, hooks, plugins
and MCP while leaving auth working, which matters for correctness and not
just speed — the global CLAUDE.md here asks for caveman-mode replies and
that would have leaked into answers. --no-session-persistence writes no
transcript, and a dedicated empty cwd keeps launcher questions out of any
project's history or auto-memory. Confirmed no project namespace, no
transcript and no memory write after a run.
Not --bare, which looks right and is a trap: its auth is strictly
ANTHROPIC_API_KEY, so it cannot use the subscription at all.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Silence on stdout is the launcher's fall-back-to-Wikipedia signal, so it
has to stay clean — but that made a misconfigured key indistinguishable
from a working fallback. Every reason now prints on stderr, which the
launcher discards and a human running qs-ask by hand can read.
Drops curl -f so a 4xx body's own error message ("API key is invalid.")
surfaces instead of just an exit code, and guards the specific mistake of
pasting the sk-ant-... placeholder literally.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Adds qs-ask on the mediaserver — the Anthropic key lives there and nowhere
else, so neither desktop holds a credential and there's one place to
rotate it. The launcher pipes the question over the same SSH path the
server monitor already uses; the query goes over stdin because
`ssh host cmd arg` would re-parse arg through the remote shell.
Claude answers first, Wikipedia is the fallback. The script is the
feature gate: with no key it exits silently, which is the same signal as
a failed call or an UNKNOWN reply, so the Wikipedia path stays the
default with zero configuration. The card names whichever answered.
Haiku 4.5, no thinking and no effort (effort errors on Haiku) — a
one-sentence fact needs no reasoning tokens. ~$0.0005 per query.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Sixth surface in the SDF chrome shader, melting out of the bottom
frame. Volume is reactive via Pipewire so the OSD also fires for
pavucontrol/mixer changes; brightness routes through a new osd IPC
handler since sysfs backlight only notifies via POLLPRI.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
