We still do horses, but hardly anyone is favouring them for travelling around the continent delivering mail.
Kudos to the people that would rather experience that, I guess.
Except that if you've ever seen someone who truly knows how to use a terminal, you'd be surprised how many times faster he can work than with any other UI-based workflow.
This may change with AI, but so far I'm not holding my breath.
Had I chosen to script it, I would probably still be hunting for the CLI to convert PDFs to PNGs. Sometimes, the trade-off is not so clear.
Assuming very basic knowledge of CLI on Linux
for i in *.pdf; do convert "$i" "$i".png; done
If you've never heard of convert (part of imagemagick) then:
open chatgpt/gemini/claude/whatever, enter prompt:
linux cli tool to convert pdf to png
Thank you for making my point for me.
1. Install sh/bash to get `for`, or convert your 'handy one liner' to PowerShell, and verify it works
2. Install ImageMagick, then ask an LLM to tell me what to do
2.5 And somehow LLMs don't present `convert`, but `pdftoppm`, or worse, both, and give me one giant essay, without my pre-configuring the system prompt to be concise and not overly wordy and avoid meta-sentences like 'if you want more help let me know';
3. Then navigate to my website anyway, and upload everything.
So no, point not made for you. With my existing environment and existing knowledge, it took me two minutes to get the work done. Even the slightest search would have brought me above that measure. There is a local minimum for a certain n at which discoverable GUIs absolutely excel over CLIs.
A code analogy: it's a bit like how O(n^2) sort algorithms are the fastest for small n, and how most library sorts choose a different algorithm for different `n`. This is what I meant in my initial comment when I said
> Sometimes, the trade-off is not so clear.