What ReFile does
What it can & can’t do
ReFile runs one well-chosen command per request inside a locked-down sandbox. That makes it fast and safe — but it also draws hard lines. Here they are, plainly.
The short version
ReFile is excellent at single-step file operations: convert, compress, resize, crop, rotate, merge, split, extract, transcribe, OCR, remove backgrounds, strip metadata. It is not a general assistant, a code runner, or a multi-step pipeline engine.
Files & operations
✓ Can do
- ·Images: convert, resize, crop, rotate, compress, grayscale, format-swap (PNG/JPG/WebP/AVIF/HEIC/SVG)
- ·Video: re-encode, compress, resize, trim, extract frames, make GIFs, remux
- ·Audio: convert, extract from video, change volume, normalize, re-encode
- ·PDF: compress, merge, split, extract pages, remove passwords, PDF→image, PDF→text
- ·Documents: DOCX/PPTX/XLSX/ODT/MD/HTML conversions (to PDF, text, etc.)
- ·OCR text out of images, AI background removal, EXIF/metadata stripping
- ·Archives: extract zip/7z/tar/gz (with caveats below)
✕ Can't do
- ·Run arbitrary code (Python, shell scripts, etc.)
- ·Chain multiple tools in one request (no pipelines / multi-step)
- ·Anything needing the internet (no downloading from a URL)
- ·Edit file contents semantically (“rewrite this essay”, “fix this code”)
- ·Tasks that require redirection or piping (some data/CSV reshaping)
- ·Guarantee exact output file size to the byte (it targets, closely)
- ·General Q&A, coding help, or non-file requests
One request = one operation
Every request becomes exactly one command, run once. If a task genuinely needs two tools or two steps (“convert this then compress it then watermark it”), ReFile will tell you in chat rather than do it wrong. Do it as separate requests — a follow-up like “now compress it” reuses the previous output automatically.
Archives are special
Extracting an archive produces files whose names ReFile can't know in advance. For reliable results, tell it what you expect (“extract this zip, it contains PDFs”) or extract first and then act on a specific file.
It will refuse off-topic asks
ReFile is purpose-built for files. Ask it to write code, answer trivia, or do general tasks and it will politely decline and steer you back to file work. That's intentional — it keeps the product fast, predictable, and safe.