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You didn't also factor in the time to learn Pandoc (and to relearn it if you haven't used it lately). This is also just one of many daily use cases for these tools. The time it takes to know how to use a dozen tools like this adds up when an LLM can just do them all.

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This is actually how I would use AI: if I forgot how to do a conversion task, I would ask AI to tell me the command so that I can run it without rejiggering my memory first. The pandoc command is literally one line with a few flags; it's easily reviewable. Then I run pandoc myself. Same thing with the multitude of other rarely used but extremely useful tools such as jq.

In other words, I want AI to help me with invoking other tools to do a job rather than doing the job itself. This nicely sidesteps all the trust issues I have.

I do that constantly. jq's syntax is especially opaque to me. "I've got some JSON formatted like <this>. Give me a jq command that does <that>.

Google, but better.

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