Found myself needing to convert a Unix timestamp to a useful local time, and once again getting Claude to build me a custom tool was so fast I didn't even bother Googling for one first https://tools.simonwillison.net/unix-timestamp
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That’s rad! I’ve asked gpt to do the conversion out of lazyness far too many times. Burning unfathomable amount of energy on a basic calculation. I feel a bit guilty
Yeah, I've been building a pretty big collection of them at https://tools.simonwillison.net/ - almost every line of code on there was writte by an LLM (mostly Claude)
I think this is the good way of using LLM tools: for making small software helpers instead of "full articles" etc. Lot of the negativity towards LLMs are the end-result of people not seeing useful examples of it in use.
Not using Claude, but I've built many tools for @mockoon.com (https://mockoon.com/tools/) and Copilot is doing the heavy lifting. I can ship them really fast!
I just need more ideas :)
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also, apologies for making an ask of this delightful post, but... would be so cool to see some transcripts of how it happened, ala yesterday's awesome hackery,
https://bsky.app/profile/simonwillison.net/post/3lbe3bmumjs25
(I want to figure out when my Bluesky rate limit is going to reset after getting a bit trigger-happy with their API)
Do you end up committing or hosting all these artifacts someplace so you'll be able to find them again when similar needs arise later?
I just need more ideas :)
timestamp=1732160907; TZ=UTC date -r $timestamp "+UTC: %A, %Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S" && date -r $timestamp "+Local: %A, %Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S %Z"
I think my new tool is better!
`date -d @1732180485`
Pretty handy with an alias.