4 ms·

The subjects in the study you are referencing also believed that they were more productive with it. What metrics do you have to convince yourself you aren't und

• simonw 1y ago
  Yesterday I used ffmpeg to extract the frame at the 13 second mark of a video out as a JPEG. If I didn't have an LLM to figure that out for me I wouldn't have done it at all.
  • devmor 1y ago
    You wouldn't have just typed "extract frame at timestamp as jpeg ffmpeg" into Google and used the StackExchange result that comes up first that gives you a command to do exactly that?
    • simonw 1y ago
      Before LLMs made ffmpeg no-longer-frustrating-to-use I genuinely didn't know that ffmpeg COULD do things like that.
      • devmor 1y ago
        I'm not really sure what you're saying an LLM did in this case. Inspired a lost sense of curiosity?
        • Philpax 1y ago
          Translated a vague natural language query ("cli, extract frame 13s into video") into something immediately actionable with specific examples and explanations, surfacing information that I would otherwise not know how to search for. That's what I've done with my ffmpeg LLM queries, anyway - can't speak for simonw!
          • wizzwizz4 1y ago
            DuckDuckGo search results for "cli, extract frame 13s into video" (no quotes): • https://stackoverflow.com/questions/10957412/fastest-way-to-extract-frames-using-ffmpeg https://stackoverflow.com/questions/10957412/fastest-way-to-... • https://superuser.com/questions/984850/linux-how-to-extract-frames-from-a-video-lossless https://superuser.com/questions/984850/linux-how-to-extract-... • https://www.aleksandrhovhannisyan.com/notes/video-cli-cheat-sheet/ https://www.aleksandrhovhannisyan.com/notes/video-cli-cheat-... • https://www.baeldung.com/linux/ffmpeg-extract-video-frames https://www.baeldung.com/linux/ffmpeg-extract-video-frames • https://ottverse.com/extract-frames-using-ffmpeg-a-comprehensive-guide/ https://ottverse.com/extract-frames-using-ffmpeg-a-comprehen... Search engines have been able to translate "vague natural language queries" into search results for a decade, now. This pre-existing infrastructure accounts for the vast majority of ChatGPT's apparent ability to find answers.
            • stelonix 1y ago
              Yet the interface is fundamentally different, the output feels much more like bro pages[0] and it's within a click of clipboarding, one CTRL V away from extracting the 13th second screenshot. I've been using Google the past 24 years and my google-fu has always left people amazed; yet I can no longer bother to go through Stack Exchange's results when an LLM not only spits it out so nicely, but also does the equivalent of a explainshell[1]. Not comparable and I fail to see why going through Google's ads/results would be better? [0] https://github.com/pombadev/bropages https://github.com/pombadev/bropages [1] https://github.com/idank/explainshell https://github.com/idank/explainshell
              • wizzwizz4 1y ago
                DuckDuckGo insists on shoving "AI Assist" entries in its results, so I have a reasonable idea of how often LLMs are completely wrong even given search results. The answer's still "more than one time in five". I did not suggest using Google Search (the company's on record as deliberately making Google Search worse), but there are other search engines. My preferred search engines don't do the fancy "interpret natural language queries" pre-processing, because I'm quite good at doing that in my head and often want to research niche stuff, but there are many still-decent search engines that do, and don't have ads in the results. Heck, you can even pay for a good search engine! And you can have it redirect you to the relevant section of the top search result automatically: Google used to call this "I'm feeling lucky!" (although it was before URI text fragments, so it would just send you to the top of the page). All the properties you're after, much more cheaply, and you keep the information about provenance, and your answer is more-reliably accurate.
        • 0x457 1y ago
          LLM somewhat understood ffmpeg documentation? Not sure what is not clear here.
        • simonw 1y ago
          My general point is that people say things like "yeah, but this one study showed that programmers over-estimate the productivity gain they get from LLMs so how can you really be sure?" Meanwhile I've spent the past two years constantly building and implementing things I never would have done because of the reduction in friction LLM assistance gives me. I wrote about this first two years ago - AI-enhanced development makes me more ambitious with my projects - https://simonwillison.net/2023/Mar/27/ai-enhanced-development/ https://simonwillison.net/2023/Mar/27/ai-enhanced-developmen... - when I realized I was hacking on things with tech like AppleScript and jq that I'd previously avoided. It's hard to measure the productivity boost you get from "wouldn't have built that thing" to "actually built that thing".
          • aschobel 1y ago
            "You can just do things". Agreed on all fronts. jq and AppleScript are a total syntax mystery to me, but now I use them all the times since claude code has figured them out. It's so powerful knowing the shape of a solution on not having to care about the details.
  • dingnuts 1y ago
    It is nice to use LLMs to generate ffmpeg commands, because those can be pretty tricky, but really, you wouldn't have just used the man page before? That explains a lot about Django that the author is allergic to man pages lol
    • simonw 1y ago
      I just took a look, and the man page DOES explain how to do that! ... on line 3,218: https://gist.github.com/simonw/6fc05ea7392c5fb8a5621d65e0ed01d0#file-ffmpeg-txt-L3218 https://gist.github.com/simonw/6fc05ea7392c5fb8a5621d65e0ed0... (I am very confident I am not the only person who has been deterred by ffmpeg's legendarily complex command-line interface. I feel no shame about this at all.)
      • quesera 1y ago
        Ffmpeg is genuinely complicated! And the CLI is convoluted (in justifiable, and unfortunate ways). But if you approach ffmpeg from the perspective of "I know this is possible", you are always correct, and can almost always reach the "how" in a handful of minutes. Whether that's worth it or not, will vary. :)
      • lexh 1y ago
        To be a little more fair... that example is tidily slotted into the EXAMPLES section, under the heading "You can extract images from a video, or create a video from many images". I don't think most people read the man pages top to bottom. And even if they did, then for as much grief as you're giving ffmpeg, llm has an even larger burden... no man page and the docs weigh in at over 8k lines. I get the general point that ffmpeg is a powerful, complex tool... but this is a weird fight to pick.
        • simonw 1y ago
          I could not be more confident that "ffmpeg is difficult to figure out" is not a weird fight to pick. It's notorious!
      • otabdeveloper4 1y ago
  • throwworhtthrow 1y ago
    LLM's still give subpar results with ffmpeg. For example when I asked Sonnet to trim a long video with ffmpeg, it put the input file parameter before the start time parameter, which triggers an unnecessary decode of the video file. [1] Sure, use the LLM to get over the initial hump. But ffmpeg's no exception to the rule that LLM's produce subpar code. It's worth spending a couple minutes reading the docs to understand what it did so you can do it better, and unassisted, next time. [1] https://ffmpeg.org/ffmpeg.html#:~:text=ss%20position https://ffmpeg.org/ffmpeg.html#:~:text=ss%20position
    • CamperBob2 1y ago
      That says more about suboptimal design on ffmpeg's part than it does about the LLM. Most humans can't deal with ffmpeg command lines, so it's not surprising that the LLM misses a few tricks.
      • nottorp 1y ago
        Had a LLM generate 3 lines of working C++ code that was "only" one order of magnitude slower than what i edited the code to in 10 minutes. If you're happy with results like that, sure, LLMs miss "a few tricks"...
        • ben_w 1y ago
          You don't have to leave LLM code alone, it's fine to change it — unless, I guess, you're doing some kind of LLM vibe-code-golfing? But this does remind me of a previous co-worker. Wrote something to convert from a custom data store to a database, his version took 20 minutes on some inputs. Swore it couldn't possibly be improved. Obviously ridiculous because it didn't take 20 minutes to load from the old data store, nor to load from the new database. Over the next few hours of looking at very mediocre code, I realised it was doing an unnecessary O(n^2) check, confirmed with the CTO it wasn't business-critical, got rid of it, and the same conversion on the same data ran in something like 200ms. Over a decade before LLMs.
          • 1y ago
  • dfedbeef 1y ago
    Was the answer: ffmpeg -ss 00:00:13:00 -i myvideo.avi -frames:v 1 myimage.jpeg Because this is on stack overflow and it took maybe one second to find. I've found reading the man page for a tool is usually a better way to learn what a tool can do for you now and also in the future.
    • kamranjon 1y ago
      This is the rub for me… people are so quick to forget the original source for a lot of the data these models were trained on, and how easy and useful these platforms were. Now Google will summarize this question for you in an AI overview before you even land on Stack Overflow. It’s killing the network effect of the open web and destroying our crowd sourced platforms in favor of a lossy compression algorithm that will eventually be regurgitating its own entrails.
      • dfedbeef 1y ago
        Well, maybe. People will just stop using them and will make fun of people who do. You can only bullshit people for so long.