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Qrate Inventory

Qrate is my household inventory as a web app: every box gets a QR code, every item a photo, and search finds things months later. Claude recognises an item from its photo for about 0.3 cents, and an assistant answers questions in plain language. An iOS companion adds Siri and Shortcuts.

All work

Year
2026
Role
Product, design and engineering
In the vita: 2025
Qrate on a phone, showing a box with its items, next to a storage box with a QR label.

01 · Why

It started with curiosity about AI and a mess of IKEA SAMLA boxes I couldn't stand anymore. The boxes are see-through in theory; in practice, nobody knows what's in the bottom one. I wanted to stick a code on each box, take photos while packing, and find anything later by search, by voice or by scanning the code.

A box in Qrate with its QR code and a grid of item photos.

  • 02 · How it works

    Qrate is a PWA on Next.js and Supabase. Each box gets a printed label with a QR code, laid out with jsPDF and read back with the phone camera. When I add an item, Claude looks at the photo and suggests what it is; I keep or correct it. Today it holds just under 20 boxes and around 300 items, the whole household.

  • A sheet of printable labels, each with a QR code and a box name.

  • 03 · The assistant

    The search assistant is a tool loop I wrote by hand on Claude Haiku 4.5. It streams every step, so you see which boxes it looks into. Its limits live in code, not in the prompt: at most four iterations, 1,024 tokens, and an abort signal. A test runs it against a model that never stops asking for tools and proves the loop still ends.

  • Key message

    A prompt is a request. Limits belong in code.

  • 04 · Costs

    Every AI call is logged with its token usage, which gives me a cost estimate per operation. Recognising one item costs about 0.3 cents. Prompt caching keeps the repeated part cheap, and each operation has its own route so the cached prefix stays stable.

  • 05 · iOS companion

    A small Expo app wraps Qrate for iOS. Through App Intents, Siri and Shortcuts can search the inventory, and quick actions jump straight in. A shared keychain connects it to the web app.

  • An iPhone showing a Qrate search result in Shortcuts.

06 · Outcome

Qrate runs privately for two users at qrate.cschr.dev, and it covers the whole household. It was also the next step in my agentic work: tickets as preserved groundwork, skills and path-scoped rules for the agents, and a docs check in CI. [PLACEHOLDER: one sentence on why I moved to Astryx + StyleX, and what it cost]