zlacker

I 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.

>>lpcvoi+(OP)
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.

>>lpcvoi+(OP)
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!

>>darkno+X3

  # curl -s https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/61/Sun.png | file -
  /dev/stdin: PNG image data, 256 x 256, 8-bit/color RGBA, non-interlaced

That's it, two utilities almost everybody has installed.

>>lpcvoi+17
ChatGPT has 800 million monthly users. The fraction of those who are comfortable opening a terminal and running those commands is pretty tiny.

>>simonw+28
If 800m people think delegating thinking to a slop generator is fine, that's not my loss. It's bad for humanity, but who even cares anymore in 2026, right?

>>lpcvoi+(OP)
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.

>>lpcvoi+F9
"Delegating thinking" and "figuring out how to determine an image format from the first few bytes of a file" are not the same thing.

>>simonw+ig
I disagree, in my opinion it's the exact same process, just on a much smaller scale. It's a problem, and we humans are good at solving problems. That is, until LLMs arrived, now we are supposed to become good at prompting, or something.

>>lpcvoi+2i
I used ffmpeg and yt-dlp to make an animated GIF of a kākāpō in her nest from a livestream on YouTube the other day. https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jan/25/kakapo-cam/

Much as I love kākāpō there is no way I was going to invest more than a few minutes in figuring out how to do that.

I love this new world where I can "delegate my thinking" to a computer and get a GIF of a dumpy New Zealand flightless parrot where I would otherwise be unable to do so because I didn't have the time to figure it out.

(I published it as a looping MP4 because that was smaller than the GIF, another thing I didn't have to figure out how to do myself.)

>>simonw+Ys
I agree that your project is cool, I just don't think the numerous downsides are worth the occasional cool thing like this.

>>lpcvoi+17
Yes but now do the same for every bit of programming tooling, sysadmin configuration / debugging problem and concept out there. With just a few seconds to answer each reply.

>>lpcvoi+(OP)
That's like saying 'why give people calculators, when you can pull out a slide rule'

The whole point is that you are enabling the LLM through tool use. The prompt might be "Download all the images on the wikipedia article for 'Ascetic', and print them on my dot matrix printer (the driver of which only accepts BMPs, so convert as needed)"

Your solution using file / curl is just one part of the potential higher level problem statement. Yes, someone could write those lines easily. And they could write the wrapper around them with only a little more difficulty. And they could add the 404 logic detection with a bit more...

Are you arguing LLMs should only be used on 'hard' problems, and 'easy' problems (such as downloading with curl) should be done by humans? Or are you arguing LLMs should not be used for anything?

Because I think most people would suggest humans tackle the 'hard' problems, and let the tools (LLMs) tackle the 'easy' ones.

>>hex4de+7x1
I am arguing LLMs should not be used for anything, since in my opinion their downsides outweigh their upsides.

Also, I don't consider LLMs a tool, because I can trust my tools, and I cannot trust anything an LLM outputs.

>>donkey+oa1
It's called learning, and it used to be the hacker mindset to continuously improve. But I guess that died with slop generators.