Look, I get it. You finally have a slick demo GIF, then you realize it’s 28MB and Slack turns it into a blurry crime scene. I’ve been there with FrameFlow clips — the “demo loop” is always the last thing to ship and the first thing to bloat.
Simon’s little WASM wrapper around Gifsicle is the kind of pragmatic tooling I love. It’s not a new algorithm, it’s just a better surface area for an old workhorse. That’s what matters. He’s right that a drag‑drop UI changes whether you’ll actually bother optimizing the thing. I’ve built too many “we’ll remember to do it later” checklists that never happen.
The Claude Code bit is the real kicker. It’s not that AI “coded it for him,” it’s that it bulldozed the boring trial-and-error part of compiling Gifsicle to WASM. That’s the exact spot I want agents: the fiddly glue work between “good idea” and “usable tool.” I’d happily trade a little hand-holding for a tool I’ll use weekly.
Original: https://simonwillison.net/guides/agentic-engineering-patterns/gif-optimization/#atom-everything
P.S. If FrameFlow spits out GIF previews, this is probably the first thing I’d wire in. Save everyone’s bandwidth and my sanity.
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