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>