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Comment by hparadiz | Hacker News Reader

I am right there with you. Mind-boggling. It's a indistinguishable from magic technology!! I tried running some basic tasks through Qwen with Opencode on a 10 year old dual Xeon server for shits and giggles. I gave it a simple task like "use ffprobe first but convert this webm to mp4" and it was able to complete the task with zero network calls outside my network. On 10 year old hardware. It took about 3 minutes to complete the task. Now you may be saying 3 minutes? pfft. But I dare you to do it yourself. You're gonna be googling the CLI switches for at least 10 minutes and setting up your command. I had it actually optimize all the switches on the fly for me based on an initial ffprobe to see what is optimal.

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> 10 year old dual Xeon server...On 10 year old hardware.

Hold on, what are the specs of your rig? How much RAM?

I've been considering getting an old refurbished 2018 Mac Mini with 64Gb of DDR4 RAM but everything I've read suggests this will be way slower than my 16Gb M1 Pro Macbook.

I inherited a box with dual Xeons and 256 GB of DDR4. I then ran several tests and benchmarks of the hardware with several models.

I've been meaning to write a blog post but well whatever here's the md.

https://gist.github.com/hparadiz/f3596d00a62d8ebb2dadcc46ee5...

Qwen3.5 9B performed best.

You can absolutely still use this to do some basic stuff like tell opencode to convert a video file from one format to another. But frankly you're better off getting two AMD GPUs. Say a dual 7900XT would get way better performance.

No need to touch the Macintosh from the X86 era

> You're gonna be googling the CLI switches for at least 10 minutes

So there's this really amazing program called "man"

Yea there's something called a phone book too.

And that would be a much better source for a phone number than Googling. Similarly, the docs that ship with software are a better source for command line switches for that software than a search engine or LLM.

My lived experience right now is a lot of super talented people around me using these tools all day every day to build awesome things and then there's the randos like you on HN who think they know better. Protip: You don't know squat.

The docs that ship with it are a great source for the LLM who will be running the command and monitoring its output, fixing or adjusting whatever in order to complete my goal. Why on earth would I be calling it by hand?

> Why on earth would I be calling it by hand?

So that it's done correctly instead of wrongly

pictured

> man plows field by hand

Which is generally slower than Googling, because it's paged content in a terminal which can search only for literal strings?

This was true a decade ago; unfortunately Google has become more or less useless for most purposes at this point

You are right, but I think you miss the whole point of the agentic workflows that are being discussed in this post comments.

Yes, you surely can read man, docs, whatever, then DIY. The point is that in many areas people don’t really want to become an expert, like in ffmpeg cli arguments, they just want the work to be done. Above is an example of agent being able to do it locally, and I think it’s great

This is the part of LLMs I may just be too old to "get" because I can't imagine what people are doing that looking up command line switches is some kind of time suck they worry enough about to find a way to automate

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