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Pipelines

Most utility sites are a directory of unrelated pages: you download from one, upload to the next, and do the bookkeeping yourself. Here every tool consumes and produces the same typed asset, so a chain can be checked before it runs rather than failing halfway through.

Build one

Pick a starting kind, then add steps. Only the tools that can accept what the previous step emits are offered.

What are you starting with?

Ready-made

Each of these is one run instead of four tabs and three downloads.

How the checking works

Every tool declares what it accepts and what it produces, drawn from one closed set: text, JSON, bytes, an image, audio, video, a table, a document, a tree, a file, a URL, a colour, or a list of any of those. A step can follow another when the second accepts something the first produces.

Where the kinds nearly line up, a single-hop coercion bridges them — JSON to text, a file to bytes, a colour to a hex string. Only one hop, deliberately: a two-hop chain would too often produce a surprising result, and it is better to make you add the step you meant.

A step marked batchable maps over a list instead of choking on it, so “compress these forty images, then zip them” is one pipeline rather than forty runs and a manual gather.

todododo runs pipelines in your browser wherever every step can. A chain that includes a server-side step says so before you run it.