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?
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-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".
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!
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.
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?
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.
