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

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?

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

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.

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.)

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

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.

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