April 26, 2026
On-device. Off the rails.
Show HN: Auge Vision from Your Terminal
Reads pics, finds faces, no internet — cheers, nitpicks, and cat jokes
TLDR: Auge brings image reading, face finding, and barcode decoding to the Mac’s command line, all offline. Commenters cheered the privacy-first, no-API-key promise, while a mismatch in a Chinese text demo sparked a quick debate over whether it’s a harmless example bug or a credibility ding.
Hacker News just met its newest command-line crush: Auge, a tiny tool that reads text in images (OCR), spots faces, decodes barcodes, and labels what’s in your pics — all on your Mac, no internet needed. The crowd loved the privacy-first angle and the promise of “no API keys, ever.” One commenter simply sighed, “Very cool,” while others practically high-fived the part where any attempt to go online makes the app shut itself down. That’s a mood.
But this is HN, so the vibe flipped from honeymoon to microscope fast. The biggest eyebrow raise? A demo that says it can read Chinese, yet shows no Chinese text in the output. Cue the mini-drama: was it a sloppy example, or a hint the feature isn’t ready? One user politely called it out as likely just an example glitch, but the tiny crack sparked a familiar debate about demo trust vs. shipping fast. Meanwhile, the memes wrote themselves: people kept quoting the screenshot that labels a cat at 92% confidence, joking that Auge’s true destiny is “cat detector as a service.”
Still, the takeaway is clear: a one-command, on-device image detective that you can script like Lego. If that’s your jam, the code’s here: github.com/Arthur-Ficial/auge.
Key Points
- •Auge is a pure Swift CLI for macOS that exposes Apple’s Vision framework to the terminal.
- •It performs OCR, image classification, barcode decoding, and face detection entirely on-device.
- •The default --all mode runs all analyses in one pass and supports file, stdin, clipboard, and PDF inputs.
- •Structured outputs include plain text, Markdown, JSON, and NDJSON, supporting UNIX-style piping.
- •Privacy is enforced by NetworkGuard using URLProtocol to abort any network request, ensuring no data leaves the device.