So it turns out that a lot of these unix utilities have such bad UX that having a tool that knows how to really leverage them feels like a superpower.
If you've ever used an LLM to deal with ffmpeg you'll know exactly what I mean.
So it turns out that a lot of these unix utilities have such bad UX that having a tool that knows how to really leverage them feels like a superpower.
If you've ever used an LLM to deal with ffmpeg you'll know exactly what I mean.
It is incredibly difficult to make an UX that can beat simply typing what you need in your own words.
You think of what you need, and you type it. No need to even ask “what options should I use?”
I would rather bet that people don’t know that their problem has been solved for ages. Either they don’t know about the tools or can’t make the leap to think of using something like awk or sed to quickly script out their use cases. Or even quickly draft up a quick function/plugin in something like vim, emacs, sublime,…
In “The Pragmatic Programmer”, the power of unix tools and editor fluency is well argued. There are plenty of other books like “Unix Power Tools”, “Small, Sharp Software Tools”,…