Edit: I'm curious which LLM was used to generate the code. I fed the title of your post to claude/deepseek/qwen/codex asking to recommend a stack for this project, expecting to frown thinking that they still recommend tesseract. However, I found that they all recommend apple's vision framework. In fact the latest model to recommend Tesseract is gpt-4.1.
Later that evening, I just paused the YouTube video on my phone, circled the part of the display with Google Lens, and it read the whole thing with pretty good accuracy. It was mindblowing :)
It is a tool from a bygone era.
A hand coded electron project would have a discussion about electron vs native. Relevant in general but off topic in the context of this particular app.
What’s the downside risk of having "worse software" when you’re just ideating and putting things out there to see how people like it.
- release vibe coded tool
- on HN, someone says, d'oh, you should be using Y, not X
- give that comment to your LLM
- LLM: "The commenter on Hacker News is absolutely right, my mistake. I can easily replace X with Y if you want"
- release a new, better version of vibe coded tool
Iteration, in one afternoon.
You're totally right. Apple Vision is generally way faster and more accurate on Apple Silicon. Pure Mac-only, I'd use it. (also smaller)
Main reason I went Tesseract: I want SCM to stay portable easily. It's ARM Mac for now, but the inference layer is all JS end-to-end — Transformers.js + ONNX for CLIP/SigLIP + Whisper, Tesseract.js WASM for OCR, all in plain Node workers.
A bit of background: I'm actually an iOS/macOS dev and I really love SwiftUI and AppKit — I just wanted v1 to stay portable by construction. Exploring a native Swift + MLX v2 track separately for speed.