Simon Willison’s Weblog

q and qv zsh functions for asking questions of websites and YouTube videos with LLM (via) Spotted these in David Gasquez's zshrc dotfiles: two shell functions that use my LLM tool to answer questions about a website or YouTube video.

Here's how to ask a question of a website:

q https://simonwillison.net/ 'What has Simon written about recently?'

I got back:

Recently, Simon Willison has written about various topics including:

1. Building Python Tools - Exploring one-shot applications using Claude and dependency management with uv.
2. Modern Java Usage - Discussing recent developments in Java that simplify coding.
3. GitHub Copilot Updates - New free tier and features in GitHub Copilot for Vue and VS Code.
4. AI Engagement on Bluesky - Investigating the use of bots to create artificially polite disagreements.
5. OpenAI WebRTC Audio - Demonstrating a new API for real-time audio conversation with models.

It works by constructing a Jina Reader URL to convert that URL to Markdown, then piping that content into LLM along with the question.

The YouTube one is even more fun:

qv 'https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uRuLgar5XZw' 'what does Simon say about open source?'

It said (about this 72 minute video):

Simon emphasizes that open source has significantly increased productivity in software development. He points out that before open source, developers often had to recreate existing solutions or purchase proprietary software, which often limited customization. The availability of open source projects has made it easier to find and utilize existing code, which he believes is one of the primary reasons for more efficient software development today.

The secret sauce behind that one is the way it uses yt-dlp to extract just the subtitles for the video:

local subtitle_url=$(yt-dlp -q --skip-download --convert-subs srt --write-sub --sub-langs "en" --write-auto-sub --print "requested_subtitles.en.url" "$url")
local content=$(curl -s "$subtitle_url" | sed '/^$/d' | grep -v '^[0-9]*$' | grep -v '\-->' | sed 's/<[^>]*>//g' | tr '\n' ' ')

That first line retrieves a URL to the subtitles in WEBVTT format - I saved a copy of that here. The second line then uses curl to fetch them, then sed and grep to remove the timestamp information, producing this.