Early in April I needed to print some tax forms at the library, first time in forever, and I began to wonder: what's the easiest way to get a file onto a public computer?

There are many ways, but most of them involve creating an account somewhere or plugging in a thumb-drive. I use a password manager, so my passwords are long and complicated, not easily typed. I don't want to plug anything into a public computer, nor do I fancy uploading my taxes to some random website.

I thought about what a helpful product would looks like, and in about an hour I spun up the first version, https://gitlab.com/PavelSafronov/engye/-/tree/09f6ca401246b2...: a static Vite TS site, hosted on GitLab Pages, which uses a QR code to connect two instances of the website using WebRTC.

Now all I had to do was navigate to a URL on the library computer, scan the generated QR code, choose the tax file on my phone, and the library computer instantly downloaded it.

After the library trip, I looked further into this space, and found that no one solved the specific combination of cross-network, no install, no account, no cloud. Snapdrop and PairDrop are similar sites but are LAN-only or require a public room. LocalSend requires installing software on both devices, which makes that impractical for public devices. And other solutions were either hardware locked (AirDrop, Quick Share), required uploading files to the cloud (Google Drive, Dropbox), or sent data through their own servers (Wormhole).

So with some determination, night and weekend coding, and plenty of scope creep, we have...

Engye, pronounced "an-jee" like the name Angie, is available at https://engye.fuzzyworld.net and can be used to do a whole lot with just a QR code and no accounts: - send a file: users download it from your browser tab - collect files: users upload files to your browser/desktop - clipboard share: users share a single text box, good for sharing short text - virtual drive: Engye Drive allows you to create and attach a virtual thumb drive

Think I may have gotten carried away with that last one. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

My honest hope with this was to make thumb drives obsolete for MOST uses. (Almost named this project "We Break Thumb(drive)s" as a reference to the Simpsons, but couldn't get the name to work out.) It's 2026, it should be trivially simple to transfer a document from one device to another!

So I decided to make this obvious and simple project, and I think it can be quite helpful for a lot of people. It's not practical to use this app for transferring 4K movies (a large file would crash the browser, since we load the data into memory twice), but for most people's use-cases of transferring a handful of pictures and documents here and there, this project should simplify things a lot.

Engye Drive was a fun, nerdy addition after I got the basics working. I really wanted to be able to connect a virtual drive just by scanning a QR code. The web app provides full access to an Engye Drive, and by installing an npm package you can even auto-mount the drive in Finder or Explorer.

For security the app uses AES-256-GCM and new IV per each request, so your data is always encrypted between browsers. If TURN or other relays are used, they never see the plaintext, so you're safe from a MITM attack. The encryption key is in the QR code, so only people who scan your code can share data with you.

There are no accounts, and closing the browser terminates the connection. If you do need a longer session or offline usage, you can install Android/iPhone apps that run Engye in the background.

This project also served as a personal experiment in agentic coding. I designed the app, instructed Claude to implement it, then iteratively developed the app by chatting with Claude over the course of about three months.

Code’s on GitLab, AGPL-3.0 — free to use and self-host: https://gitlab.com/PavelSafronov/engye

Happy to hear what others think.

Show HN: Engye – transfer files between any two devices by scanning a QR code