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I really think you overestimate how hard it is to use imagemagick. Unless you're doing really deep wizardry - or editing video on the command line, but I'm almo

I really think you overestimate how hard it is to use imagemagick. Unless you're doing really deep wizardry - or editing video on the command line, but I'm almost certain the LLM will have more trouble with that, too - it's not hard. I didn't take that command line in the above command from a script, by the way; I rewrote it from memory, in about thirty seconds, because it's not hard. There might be a syntax error, but that'd be, what, another ten seconds? I'm not asserting that LLMs aren't useful. You demonstrate successfully that, to you, they are. I'm asserting that they're not orders of magnitude more useful than powerful, composeable interfaces to the software we already have - and they are orders of magnitude more environmentally and socially destructive.

simonw 2y ago
Comparing them to "powerful, composeable interfaces to the software we already have" doesn't make sense to me, because I'm using them in conjunction with that - I'm far more able to take advantage of the software we have now because LLMs mean I don't have constantly look up zsh escaping rules, or ffmpeg invocations, or how to run AppleScript from my terminal, or how to get a fetch() to work cross-domain via CORS or whatever. It's funny you say "editing video on the command line, but I'm almost certain the LLM will have more trouble with that, too" because ffmpeg is the perfect example of software that is almost unusable for me without LLMs, but thanks to LLMs is something I solve problems with every week: https://til.simonwillison.net/macos/quicktime-capture-script https://til.simonwillison.net/macos/quicktime-capture-script I won't disagree on the environmentally and socially destructive aspects. The question for me is if the benefits they provide compensate for the many downsides - like the fact that I can prototype 5-10x faster, while people who have never programmed before are finally able to get started on that learning curve without being put off the first time they forget a semicolon. Will I look back in ten year's time and say "wow, the positive applications of LLMs really had nothing on the negatives, I wish this had never been invented"? I don't know. Currently I'm leaning "it's worth it".

simonw 2y ago

Comparing them to "powerful, composeable interfaces to the software we already have" doesn't make sense to me, because I'm using them in conjunction with that - I'm far more able to take advantage of the software we have now because LLMs mean I don't have constantly look up zsh escaping rules, or ffmpeg invocations, or how to run AppleScript from my terminal, or how to get a fetch() to work cross-domain via CORS or whatever. It's funny you say "editing video on the command line, but I'm almost certain the LLM will have more trouble with that, too" because ffmpeg is the perfect example of software that is almost unusable for me without LLMs, but thanks to LLMs is something I solve problems with every week: https://til.simonwillison.net/macos/quicktime-capture-script https://til.simonwillison.net/macos/quicktime-capture-script I won't disagree on the environmentally and socially destructive aspects. The question for me is if the benefits they provide compensate for the many downsides - like the fact that I can prototype 5-10x faster, while people who have never programmed before are finally able to get started on that learning curve without being put off the first time they forget a semicolon. Will I look back in ten year's time and say "wow, the positive applications of LLMs really had nothing on the negatives, I wish this had never been invented"? I don't know. Currently I'm leaning "it's worth it".