alt Hacker NewsI don't understand why this is something special that somebody would need some LLM slop generation for? Any human can also do this in a few seconds using normal unix tooling.
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Well LLMs do make normal Linux tooling more accessible. I needed a video reformatted to a new aspect ratio and codec and Claude produced a rather complex set of arguments for ffmpeg that I hadn’t been able to figure out on my own.
I think this is missing the point, These are tools that enable the LLM to do things that humans can do easily.
It stops an LLM from being blocked by the inability to do this thing. Removing this barrier might enable the LLM to complete a task that would be considerable work for a human.
For instance, identifying which files are PNG files containing pictures of birds, regardless of filename, presence or absence of suffix. An image handling LLM can identify if an image is of a bird much more easily than it could determine that an arbitrary file is a png. They can probably still do it, wasting a lot of tokens along the way, but using a few commands to determine which files to even bother looking at as images means the LLM can do what it is good at.
I think you'd find that it's far from "any human" who can do this without looking anything up. I have 15y of dev exp and couldn't do this from memory on the cli. Maybe in c, but less helpful to getting stuff done!