alt Hacker NewsI'm all about clear prompting, but even using the verbatim prompt from the OP "ffmpeg command to convert movie.mov into a reasonably sized mp4", the smallest current models from Google and OpenAI (gemini-2.5-flash-lite and gpt-4.1-nano) both produced me a working output with explanations for what each CLI arg does.
Hell, the Q4 quantized Mistral Small 3.1 model that runs on my 16GB desktop GPU did perfectly as well. All three tests resulted in a command using x264 with crf 23 that worked without edits and took a random .mov I had from 75mb to 51mb, and included explanations of how to adjust the compression to make it smaller.
There's as much variability in LLM AI as there is in human intelligence. What I'm saying is that I bet if that guy wrote a better prompt his "failing LLM" is much more likely to stop failing, unless it's just completely incompetent.
What I always find hilarious too is when the AI Skeptics try to parlay these kinds of "failures" into evidence LLMs cannot reason. If course they can reason.