A small gui to automate generating some pdfs from some CSV files.
There’s a small non-profit in my area helping people operate localized energy distribution (as producers and consumers). Each month, they receive a zip file containing the raw kiloWatt-hours produced and consumed by each participant over the past month as CSV files. So far the non-profit has been manually importing these CSVs into LibreOffice to generate graphs and tables and export the whole thing as an individualized PDF file for each participant. Now that they’re starting to help more than 2-3 operations, it’s become useful to try to automate that process.
I’ve been writing it in rust for a few reasons. First of all I wanted cross-compilation to be sure to work and at this point I’m more familiar with rust than go, secondly I read a blog post recently that evaluated rust gui solutions in terms of accessibility and IME-compatibility on windows. I started off looking for a “direct” pdf-writing library but eventually switched to using typst to generate the pdfs from templates I write. typst being written in rust has enabled me to bundle its engine into the program in a pretty-straightforward way.
I’m currently working on allowing the import of multiple sets of data so that the generated PDFs can show line plots of the electricity production and consumption over several months.








I haven’t tried any Anthropic models personally.
So far, between the free online chats by OpenAI and DeepSeek, and the smaller models I’ve run on my own machine, the most useful things I have gotten from it were to treat it as an overeager student that lacks the first-hand experience needed to see the big picture, asking it questions that I’m pretty sure I already know the answer to and seeing if 1) it “understands” what I’m getting at and 2) it can surprise me with a viewpoint I hadn’t thought of before.
Using them to double-check my own ideas seems to be marginally useful, especially when there’s no qualified human being whose attention I can borrow. Using them as a sort of semantic web search can sometimes get me what I’m looking for faster than Google. If anything, they’re an opportunity to exercise critical thinking; if I can tell where it’s getting things wrong I can be fairly confident that my own understanding of the problem/subject is pretty solid.
Vibe coding, though? I have yet to see it work out. Maybe as some starting slop so that I can get to work refactoring code (and get the ideas flowing) instead of staring at a blank file.