Done in 5 seconds.
I just use Pandoc for that purpose and it takes 30 seconds, including the time to install pandoc. For code generation where you'll review everything, AI makes sense; but for such conversion tasks, it doesn't because you won't review the generated HTML.
On some speedrunning competition maybe? Just tested on my work machine, `sudo apt-get pandoc` took 11 seconds to complete, and it was this fast only because I already had all the depndencies installed.
Also I don't think you'll be able to fulfill the "using another blog post as a style reference" part of GP's requirements - unless, again, you're some grand-master Pandoc speedrunner.
Sure, AI will make mistakes with such conversion tasks. It's not worth it if you're going to review everything carefully anyway. In code, fortunately, you don't have to - the compiler is doing 90% of the grunt work for you. In writing, depends on context. Some text you can eyeball quickly. Sometimes you can get help from your tool.
Literally yesterday I back-ported a CV from English to Polish via Word's Translation feature. I could've done it by hand, but Word did 90% of it correctly, and fixing the remaining issues was a breeze.
Ultimately, what makes LLMs a good tool for random conversions like these is that it's just one tool. Sure, Pandoc can do GP's case better (if inputs are well-defined), but it can't do any of the 10 other ad-hoc conversions they may have needed that day.
Relying on the compiler to catch every mistake is a pretty limited strategy.
Re:Pandoc. Sure, if that's the only task I used it for. But I used it for 10 different ones per day (write a JSON schema for this json file, write a Pydantic validator that does X, write a GitHub workflow doing Y, add syntax highlighting to this JSON, etc). Re:this specific case - I prefer real HTML using my preferred tools (DaisyUI+tailwind) so I can edit it after. I find myself using a lot less boilerplate-saving libraries, and knowing a few tools more deeply.
Normalizing this kind of computer errors when there should be none makes the world a worse place, bit by bit. The kind of productivity increase you get from here does not seem worthwhile.
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.
How do you trust a human in the same situation? You don't, you verify.
It's disorienting for me to hear that some people are so blinded by AI assistants that they no longer know how human assistants behave.
