Sunscreen, a stylus, and 16 hours of pair programming with an AI

A kernel developer used Claude to build a working handwriting recognition mode for KDE's on-screen keyboard after discovering Qt Virtual Keyboard's handwriting feature is locked behind proprietary engines. An attempt to train a custom BiLSTM model failed with an 82.93% character error rate on unseen fonts, so he switched to the GPL-3 WritePad engine, reaching 6.75% character error rate. The result: four commits, about 5,000 lines across 32 files, and 79 tests, built in roughly 15 to 16 hours of active work over a 30-hour span. He reports Claude's main failure mode was guessing at fixes instead of measuring, and the work is not upstream yet, with the GPL-3 engine a point to discuss with the maintainers.

Source: https://www.collabora.com/news-and-blog/blog/2026/11/02/sunscreen-a-stylus-and-16-hours-of-pair-programming-with-an-ai. 8 Sync News only summarizes and links out; content copyright belongs to the authors and original sources.

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