Comment by skydhash
6 days ago
The one thing about concocting throwaway scripts yourself is the increased familiarity with the tooling you use. And you're not actually throwing away those scripts. I have random scripts laying around my file system (and my shell history) to check how I did a task in the past.
> increased familiarity with the tooling you use
In general I agree, but sometimes you want something that you haven't done in years but vaguely remember.
~20 years ago I worked with ffmpeg and vlc extensively in an IPTV project. It took me months to RTFM, implement stuff, test and so on. Documentation was king, and really the only thing I could use. Old-school. But after that project I moved on.
In 2018 I worked on a ML - CV project. I knew vlc / ffmpeg could do everything that I needed, but I had forgotten most of everything by then. So I googled/so/random-blogs, plus a bit of RTFM where things didn't match. But it still took a few days to cobble together the thing I needed.
Now I just ask, and the perfect one-liner pops-up, I run it, check that it does what I need it to, and go on my merry way. Verification is much faster than context changing, searching, reading, understanding, testing it out, using a work-around for the features that ffmpeg supports but not that python wrapper, and so on.
I used to do that too. I find I don't really need to save anything less than 100 lines these days because I can just ask again when I need it.