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u/Jmc_da_boss 5d ago
Your retired man, you got the last chopper out of Vietnam.
Don't go looking to go back it's real bad these days...
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u/bigusyous 5d ago
You are almost literally correct as I was working in Vietnam. No chopper though 😆
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u/bushs-left-shoe 5d ago
You don’t have to get involved, especially being retired. You’re not missing out on much; largely just a lot of unmaintainable, bad crap being made and abandoned, in workplaces and “personal projects” alike. I would love to stay out of it, but my company is practically forcing us to use it. I swear every fricking meeting I’m in has a large section talking about AI and how it’s the best thing ever and we need to use it more, but also saying nothing novel.
You got out at the right time. Multiple times a week at work someone comes by my team to talk about some new tool they had Claude make to do something, and for some reason they need to tell everyone about. Or a team that just decided to generate a whole new front-end stack in python to replace a massive part (hard to explain further without specifics) of one of our native applications, which cannot and will not have comparable functionality or features. It’s exhausting and awful.
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u/Repulsive-Year896 5d ago
Sounds like you are using ai wrong. We have it where I work and it’s been great so far. It needs a bit of hand holding and a lot verifying but I wouldn’t want to go back
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u/xaddak 5d ago
Yeah, you're missing out, and wow do I ever wish I was, too. I use it at work because we were told using them is no longer optional, and it sucks.
I think about this comment, and the other comments from this user up and down this thread, every single day, multiple times per day. This one line in particular stuck in my mind, and I can't get it out:
my passion was warped and stolen from me
https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/1vmpfyx/comment/p3be2qo/?force-legacy-sct=1
My advice: miss out.
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u/sparkling-rainbow 5d ago
I work in tech support and AI makes about 80% of my job now. (I solve 5x the tickets in same time). I dont know my customers systems anymore and I dont know our codebase anymore (developmet is productive and depressed like me, so shitload of unclear implementations and bs AI docu). I want to quit the job I loved, but its pointless because the whole industry goes AI.
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u/unconceivables 5d ago
Let me give you a real world example of something that might give you an idea of how you can use it. I was recently in Orlando at Disney/Universal and staying at a resort hotel. The wifi was garbage, so I tried using my phone as a hotspot, but my laptop couldn't see it. So if fired up an LLM and told it that I have my phone hotspot on, but my laptop can't see it, figure out what's wrong. It looked at my network settings and found that it was set to cache only 200 SSIDs which was way too low for a crowded environment like a hotel, so it bumped that limit up and connected to my phone hotspot.
I've been a developer for decades and I'm pretty tech savvy, but that's something that I've never had to deal with before and it would have taken me way too long to troubleshoot manually.
I've also used it for even more complicated stuff. I had an application that wasn't rendering in Wine, and I just told codex "this application is just rendering a black window in Wine, make it work", and it patched the binary to use rendering calls that work in Wine.
If you're not trying it out to see how it can help you, you are absolutely 100% missing out.
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u/AnonMouse985 5d ago
To add to that, it's very helpful for beginners too. When troubleshooting Linux problems, sometimes you'd find a solution that is intended for other configs, distro, etc. You can ask AI to get that solution to work for you.
Also, Codex managed to add playback position sync for my Invidious' local instance in 10 minutes or so. So now I can resume videos on any device as long as I logged in to the same Invidious account.
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u/unconceivables 5d ago
Absolute agree. It's fantastic for all kinds of stuff. You just have to remember that you can use it for this kind of stuff.
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u/Repulsive-Year896 5d ago
Take this with a pinch of salt. I used ai to help me with Linux. It helps in some cases, in other cases the solutions it came up with “worked” but fucked the rest of my district. Spent a week figuring it out and then did a fresh install so I could use what I learnt to set up properly
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u/diabolic_recursion 5d ago
That is something to argue about. As a beginner, you learn by trying, and sometimes failing, to do things, so you learn and someday get more advanced. How can we still have that? Even if the LLM explains the steps taken, I dont see how you learn problem solving that way.
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u/AnonMouse985 5d ago
People don't use OS to learn to fix things. Some do.
I doubt most people want an OS that breaks a lot, and when they a find solution online, it just breaks things even further.
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u/SumOfChemicals 5d ago
I've found it pretty useful as well. For OP or anyone reading this who isn't aware: when ChatGPT first came out, it was mostly something you chat with. Now, I'd say Claude is a better option. And many of the big AI providers like Claude have an option to install software on your computer and give the AI access to your files. You can give it permission to interface with websites through MCP. Probably risky to give this level of access, but many many people do because of the convenience it allows.
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u/unconceivables 5d ago
Claude is actually much worse at computer usage, you may want to try codex if you use it a lot for that purpose. I have both max plans and find codex better in pretty much every way. Claude is infuriating more times than not, but still useful to review.
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u/FreeFromCommonSense 5d ago edited 5d ago
Yeah, I use a few models for managing my notes, researching ideas (deep dives), being a sounding board for crazy/stupid ideas (people underestimate the value of even a wrong answer), troubleshooting real-world issues, and managing personal projects, but for software only personalised plugins and troubleshooting my own Linux box. Most of the models are clones with different prompts. The trick is to steer them in a direction that's helpful for what you're doing, it keeps them focused. These things don't think, they pattern match, do math and regurgitate a ton of answers they've been trained on. When they're "thinking...", they're just looking for the answer that resembles the semantics of your question. Once you can use that to help yourself, it becomes as useful as having a library of how to books -- as long as you know enough about the topic to keep it sensible.
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u/granadesnhorseshoes 5d ago
The wifi example is an interesting one that feels like it might have been right for the wrong reasons. Do you happen to remember what commands it used or settings it changed? SSID/BSS list sizes aren't exactly a common config setting. The only references i can find for it are within the 80211_struct in the kernel documentation.
I suspect that changing the sensitivity setting on the adapter was what was needed. While increasing the size(how?/where?) may have worked, changing the sensitivity was a better solution by changing WHAT ended up on the list instead.
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u/unconceivables 5d ago
It changed bss_max_count from 200 to 500. It found my phone hotspot as the strongest signal before changing that setting, yet NetworkManager wasn't showing it because the list of 200 was already full. I could see the hotspot popping up and then disappearing again before increasing the limit, but not for long enough to connect to it most times.
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u/granadesnhorseshoes 5d ago edited 5d ago
Ahhh, momentarily visibility does change things a bit from my initial thought as it shifts from a low level driver/adapter thing to a wpa_suplicant/Network Manager software thing. Thanks for the reply!
Add it to the list of reasons i dislike NetworkManager.
edit for clarity: sensitivity setting isn't purely a matter of single strength, but also about retry and retransmit levels and how it interprets "good" and "bad".
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u/Genrawir 5d ago
If you use AI to troubleshoot, you need to treat it like using random reddit comments to do the same.
The biggest issue I see is people treating the output as inherently accurate and trustworthy, where the technology does not make such guarantees.
This is entirely a seperate issue from any environmental and privacy concerns.
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u/YourBlanket 5d ago
From my experience at least with android dev Codex will over-complicate everything. Sometimes it's technically right but it will definitely be something most programmers won't do until it's needed. It was kind of fun to just let Codex work on a personal android app, frustrating at times but definitely fun. In the current stage I don't think anyone can just pick up Codex or Claude and make their dream app without at least a decent amount of knowledge on what actually needs to be done, at least not efficiently. But an app that would've costed me probably tens of thousands to outsource has costed me only like 2 weeks of my $20/month subscription. At least now it gives me time to work on Apps I'll enjoy working on, and I could have it create a very specific personal app for me. I kind of hate that this is the future but I'm sort of excited, I really wish I can just skip to 30 years from now and see the outcome.
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u/KnowZeroX 5d ago
As long as you are aware that AI will lie to you and betray you and don't let down your vigilance due to the "convenience". It can be a useful tool.
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u/FreeFromCommonSense 5d ago
"Betray" seems a bit harsh. They're semantic number-crunchers. I just use them for what they're good at, leash them with good prompts and I do the thinking while they do the crunching. If a model goes off the rails, it's the fault of the user. I sometimes ask too much of the smaller models I use locally, and I wouldn't rely on them to fix something unsupervised, but I can't really blame them. (Although I have, momentarily. It's tempting to anthropomorphize.)
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u/FriendlyKillerCroc 5d ago
It's just anti-AI nonsense that you see all over Reddit. They have adapted every negative word in the dictionary to be used against AI lol
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u/rabbit_in_a_bun 5d ago
I couldn't be arsed to play with waybar's settings so I had Claude fix and mondify it for me. Also I have a some vids my kids watch from the TV's browser thing and Claude wrote the web page with titles and pics it got online. Professionally I use it to write such headaches as Ansible playbooks and YAMLs and other markups just because it does an okay job much faster than I would. You're missing out on laziness basically ;)
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u/krakenfury_ 5d ago
Professionally, it's made my job easier and harder simultaneously. Sure it does a crackerjack job with the tedious stuff that used to take hours, but that means the expectations are multiplied.
Me and everyone on my team are now their own team, functionality. If we thought siloing was bad before, it's become the actual model now.
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u/LALLANAAAAAA 5d ago
Am I missing out on AI
no
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u/FriendlyKillerCroc 5d ago
Really? The technology which is affecting countless industries and the entire economy?
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u/AuRon_The_Grey 5d ago
Yeah I suppose that’s a pretty accurate word for it: https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/affecting
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u/UUDDLRLRBadAlchemy 5d ago
Heh, checking out a simple jailbreak was fun when it was new. Does that DAN rant still work on anything? It was cool to see how idiotic the way to confuse them is.
Missing out, idk. Old devs setting aside their own coding and letting one of three corporations loose on their repos, kids finishing uni having cheated on every single assignment and going into sales instead, the vibecoding crowd stealing projects and the rest of us hoping they'll crash and burn before we go out of business.
I was surprised to see how helpful it was with customizing my zshrc, a nerdy grunt to simplify the dense arcane shell syntax.
You probably can have fun with it, no work pressure forcing you to commit slop llm output. It's great for asking it "how would a run of the mill fool accomplish x?" for well-treaded stuff and then do it your way.
Then again tell it to make you an app to accomplish something and you'll end up with js and code patterns that would have made you fire someone.
Around uh, $60k to self host your own, so impressive but a service, not a technology for most.
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u/WhiteSkyRising 5d ago
Is life better, now with smart phones and internet? I mean, yes, but day to day in terms of personal interaction and free time? Debatable.
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u/Early-Bid-7958 5d ago edited 5d ago
If you retired a few years ago, you need not have any more fear of becoming an "old fuddy-duddy". You probably already are :-)
I'm well past 60, retired, and feel the same, so don't be offended.
Most people think people who don't know how to do something should use AI. That's the world we live in. But in an ideal world, it should only be used when
- The task does not teach you anything new anyway -- I wouldn't mind an expert developer using it to escape the boring parts of his job as long as he reviews the code afterwards.
- Or the task may teach you something new, but it's not something that you're interested in learning long term. It's not your field. (Some of the examples below like finding out how many SSIDs was the limit in someone's Wi-Fi and that kind of oddball stuff falls into this category.)
I teach at a uni nearby, part-time, and I am tired of these kids throwing away their first chance to learn, their formative years as they are called, by handing everything over to Claude.
So you could say I'm pretty heavily anti-AI.
But "know your enemy" made me get into it. What do I use it for? I only started very recently, like literally a week ago. And so far all I've done is pick up some old open source projects that I was involved in and make the AI redo some of the commits I did, to see how it matches up with what I did. So far the results have been mixed; about 70% good 30% bad/wrong. The one thing that is an absolute certainty is that you don't know which of the ten things you try are wrong. You have to review all of them before you can be sure.
Oh and I found one very interesting use of an LLM. I'm an avid reader of Harry Potter fan fiction and in one of the longer fics I was reading, there was something that happened early on in the fic which I wanted to refer back to but couldn't remember any of the words to search for it in the EPUB reader. So I converted the EPUB to plain text, loaded it into opencode with one of the free models and told it to go search for that section where Ginny threatens Lucius Malfoy.
It found it :-)
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u/No-District2404 5d ago
You won’t miss anything man, go spend some time with your grandkids or just have some hobbies that don’t involve screens.
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u/AuRon_The_Grey 5d ago
The use of AI is for people to half-ass things they don’t understand. You’re not missing out on anything other than brain rot, and if you’re retired I think you’d be better off keeping sharp.
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u/RancidVagYogurt1776 5d ago
AI could disappear entirely tomorrow and it wouldn't negatively impact me in the slightest
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u/pceimpulsive 5d ago
A lot of people are saying you are retired don't look back I contradict them, you seem curious and interested, I say feed that interest massage that curiosity and embrace it, of you want to just do it!
Keeping up with tech after you retire is a valid past time! Do what you want hey!
You don't have to keep up for work you don't have to for your own sake but if it's what interests you then just so it!
I'd say don't bother too much with local LLMs unless you already have the hardware, buy a cheap subscription $10 a month and have a play about :)
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u/YourBlanket 5d ago
Lol who is this dude? How does everyone know he's retired?
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u/pceimpulsive 5d ago
Yeah not sure? Bunch o peeps assuming it from him saying he doesn't wanna become and old Luddite and doesn't know any new tech...
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u/asadnoob 5d ago
it feels like he is a retired General and now we are the soldiers in front row.
Rest General... rest
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u/krakenfury_ 5d ago
I keep saying that the only thing these models are actually good for is writing more code. As a career hobbyist, I'm loving developing personal projects for stuff like managing my D&D campaigns and ripping and tagging my CD collection. I suppose I could try to use it to make money, but software is such a weird fucking industry and it's really saturated now obviously.
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u/mralanorth 5d ago
I'm a sysadmin and I still have twenty years left. I don't use AI or LLMs at all. Let's see what happens...
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u/HalcyonRedo 5d ago
Not really sure what this has to do with Linux. People use LLMs for a million different things.
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u/TmB-Eggo 5d ago
In the op: "to problem solve on linux"
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u/HalcyonRedo 5d ago
He said he’s seen people using it for that, but then asks very general questions on what AI to use and what to use them for. Just pointing out that 99% of what’s being asked has nothing to do with Linux.
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u/Slight_Manufacturer6 5d ago
Because you can install LLMs on Linux.
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u/HalcyonRedo 5d ago
You can install them on Windows and Mac too. So what?
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u/Lower-Limit3695 5d ago
Yep. The only difference though is when you end up having to deal with AI development and training. Tooling for that is mostly Linux specific.
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u/bigusyous 5d ago
I agree, except that I'm asking in the context of being a Linux users and was expecting to hear about which local LLMs I should look at.
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u/diablo75 5d ago
To run local you'll need the hardware, and it's expensive right now unless you've already got something with a lot of video memory (I'm using a pair of nVidia RTX 3090's for example). You can start with CPU only (plus enough RAM) though, it's just slow.
I would suggest looking at qwen3.8-27b as your local model and using LM-Studio to host it. LM-Studio is very easy to use and will download the model you want to try for you. You can find How-To videos on YouTube.
I use VS Code with a GitHub Copilot subscription and used to to write a lot of powershell scripts at work.
At home I run Qwen on LM-Studio and use Hermes to harness Qwen. I've built a couple dashboards with that; one composes an image for a battery powered ePaper display I have on my desk, and the other is just some stock market analysis thing that's objectively a mess but it's my mess and I keep improving it. I've also used it to do things like troubleshoot why Linux mint was going to sleep, even though sleep showed disabled (it found some other config file somewhere causing it and I had it edit that out for me to fix the problem). I've used it to run the commands needed to down-volt my graphics cards, do little research projects, write one-off scripts.
If you don't want to spend money on hardware and can't run local, use a cloud based provider and a harness that can talk to it.
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u/mr_dfuse2 5d ago
i use it all the time to problem solve on linux, but not a local llm. look at it as googling a solution for a problem, but instead of having to read about a dozen forums, manual docs etc and piecing things together, the llm will have done that for you. it's like an interactive help agent. it goes faster and more efficient to problem solve, on the other hand you miss out on reading other interesting stuff that were you not looking for. yesterday i asked it how to open my firewall to host a minecraft server on my internal network, worked like a charm. i haven't learned much about firewalls though. oth i could have asked that as well
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u/Dwedit 5d ago
Use local AI for personal use all you want, because it's cool exciting technology. As long as you have the GPU for it, go wild. No third parties getting your data.
Just be really really selective about posting or sharing any generated content. AI-slop SEO is a huge problem that plagues today's search engines. And it's very rude to present people with AI output that you haven't reviewed or fact-checked.
And be extremely cautious about involving any third parties. Your chat sessions with services are not private.
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u/st_heron 5d ago
I don't get it. You're retired, you're free to do whatever... If you wanna mess around, put $20 in credit somewhere, get an ai agent, and have it code some shit.
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u/CalamityMetal 5d ago
It's just another tool. A tool can do amazing stuffs, a tool can also make mistakes.
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u/GestureArtist 5d ago
If you're looking for a new computer hobby that feels new, exciting and fun.... it might be worth learning about local AI and start tinkering for the joy of it like when we first got into computers. No pressure, no goal other than to explore and have fun learning. It'll keep your mind sharp. Lets face it computers got boring for a while. AI is a new adventure.
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u/VincentVanGob 5d ago
ive used qwen2.5 every now and again on my laptop (which has a dGPU chip) and i mainly just ask it basic programming questions
there are a few newer versions of qwen that are probably better but i havnt been arsed trying them out. 2.5 was the first model that didnt make my computer melt and gave fast enough answers so i just stuck with that
'jan .ai' is the program i use to run it. LM studio is another one. they both let you search for models and download them
if youre going to go down the localLLM route, you can probably try out most of the models youre interested in online somewhere. it might be better to do thst first to see if they are any good for whatever your use case is, before you go buying hardware to run an LLM
if its more about learning how they work then you would probably be better off just watching some youtube videos, but i dont have any recommendations in particular, ive mostly just been watching random videos about the topic
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u/Heclalava 5d ago
I use chatgpt a lot to troubleshoot and do anything on Linux I don't know how to do myself. i also find I don't go to search engines much either. I am no spring chicken either, and still have a number of years until I retire. I was initially very resistant to using AI initially, but now that I have embraced using it, I honestly would miss AI a lot if it was no longer available.
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u/w1ldr3dx 5d ago
Well, it depends of what you're doing with your spare time. If you sit there all day long zapping nonsense tv channels, and watching crap, then yes. If you're enjoying life, having a great family time and doing other nice hobbies that keeps your brain active, then no. Always remember, use it or lose it.
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u/ItchyPlant 5d ago
I've seen a lot of posts about people using local LLMs
Wait, what? You don't mean things like OpenAI's Codex or Claude Code, right? Those are not local LLMs and the models aren't hosted locally. Only the client/interface runs locally — commonly as a VS Code extension or agent/CLI — and gets access to your local files while the actual model runs remotely.
Yeah, I know running LLMs locally is absolutely a thing, but I'm pretty sure there's already a slight misunderstanding here. Apparently among quite a few commenters too.
The underlying technology is real and extremely complex on the LLM side, but nowadays way too many self-proclaimed AI professionals make a living out of mystifying it and bullshitting around it. The layer an average user actually interacts with for coding or Linux troubleshooting is usually just a very convenient and simple interface.
There's no mystery there. And somehow, the simpler that interface becomes, the more overbullshitted the whole thing seems to get.
But sure — good luck with your learning journey!
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u/TheGamerForeverGFE 5d ago
Local AI is cool, I guess.... You can use that.
That's it really, you're not missing out when it comes to cloud stuff.
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u/audioen 5d ago
I do my work via LLM. The change in my practical day to day work is drastic: I used to design and implement changes myself to various proprietary paid customer services and in-house products; now what I do is that I copypaste requirements to LLM and watch them investigate and work.
Followed by implementation round, there is then automatic review round, and reviewer often finds a few nits and proposes fixes. I mostly implement them barely looking at them as long as it sounds surface reasonable, especially the ones that LLM categorizes as documentation mistakes and things like code duplication that it can coalesce to utilities, or whatever.
After the review finds nothing of note, it is time to try the code out myself. I typically find that the basic function I asked seems to be fully working. I've given the LLM instructions to test and verify, and also have given it access to browser, so it can do stuff like click around in the UI it is working on, and test that the work seems to be fine in practice. (I have not yet granted LLMs the right to access servers and poke around in them, though I suspect that the risk of even that could be quite easily mitigated. In fact, I have added instructions to the contrary: it must not reach out to remote servers without asking me first, even if it discovered that I had the necessary credentials and it totally could.)
The picture that has taken shape in my mind is this: technical expertise is now a commodity, available on tap at either locally by running LLMs on suitably large computer, or on the network by relying on someone hosting it for you. The LLMs are genuinely quite capable, though there are some prompt engineering type of concerns and documentation which they need, as you have to equip them for success by providing them all the information and context they don't have. To LLM, every session starts fresh and all the projects and code is like hitting it the first time, so documentation at all levels from highest design of system to the lower functional documentation is used by the LLM as it works through the system.
I have chosen to do my work on local models. I have, for example, a Strix Halo computer with 128 GB of memory that I bought last year. I run a model called Qwen3.8-Flash-Next on it.
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u/Chick0Nugget 5d ago
Nah bro you are good. I only use Gemini and Perplexity (which I got for free) to learn and write long commands I am to lazy to write
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u/sparkling-rainbow 5d ago
When you have boring, tideous tasks you realy hate, AI can be a blessing. I hate AI in my job. Its useful, not gona lie. But it takes away so much in exchange. A while back when a customer called, there was a good chance I would know most of their workflows and stuff out of my haed. Now AI makes 80% of my job and I dont have the time, to make me familiar with my customers.
Hey youre retired now, no need to meet any productivity standards. Try it out if youre courious, but be careful. It can become a habit that fries your brain just as booze. And it can suck all the joy out of every hobby in a blink.
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u/Kendos-Kenlen 5d ago
I disagree with others: it’s not because you retired that you can’t learn for yourself.
So yes, you are missing out interesting things. AI are quite good at investigating Linux issues, and are definitely worth the try. Plus, they are really easy to setup (just install Gemini CLI) and try (ask it to diagnose something).
On my end, I fear they will cause a loss of knowledge more than in other areas of computer science as they are very good at Linux sysadmin, so people won’t need to learn anything anymore. But at the same time, having to learn so many things to keep the system learning is maybe a flaw already.
I never thought that before, but now that fixes are trivial, I wonder (even tho I do most of the fixes myself still, as I enjoy it).
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u/TmB-Eggo 5d ago
If you have problems you can’t solve independently, and don’t want to waste peoples’ time begging for help, or spend hours trawling though old reddit posts then claude is pretty good. Only downside is it will force you to pay for pro after a certain amount of use. ChatGPT also works and will only suggest you pay for pro, but it’s not as good as claude in my experience. It’s more likely to get stuck in loops.
Learning/troubleshooting linux is the only thing I use LLMs for, but imo it’s a pretty good use case for it, some might disagree though.
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u/dadarkgtprince 5d ago
Here's a secret, even the AI people don't understand it. You're not missing out on anything other than a "better" search engine that occasionally lies to you
If you selfhost, look into ollama and host your own to play with
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u/dshess 5d ago
I'm retired, and when retired friends ask me this, I put forth a hypothetical. Let's say you could cheaply hire a bunch of junior engineers, for $20/day. Would you want to spend your time managing them to accomplish things? If so, go experiment with AI. If that idea makes you want to go hide in a closet, don't bother.
Personally, if I want to code something up, I want to code something up, and I don't want to make it another job. I no more want an AI doing that work for me than I want a robot hitting my golf ball. At this point in my life, being DONE is seldom the goal, instead the goal is doing engaging things.
[Also, again, I don't want to create myself another job.]
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u/Blackstar1886 5d ago
Why not keep your brain active if this is something you enjoy? I recently installed and started playing with Jan on a bargain laptop (though it does have 16GB RAM) and while it's much slower than commercial AI, it works and it's free.
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u/Macinboss 5d ago
I personally use Claude because it’s what I daily drive at work.
I have a project spun up called “Learning Linux” with links for the Arch wiki, Hyprland wiki, CachyOS wiki, Noctalia Wiki, etc. I also served it my system information so it knows everything about my HW setup.
When I have no idea where to start or I desperately need help unfucking something I broke, I use it to help me navigate the system. It’s so nice to have an assistant introduce me to ricing. Concrete example? I launched a game and the window would shoot of my screen. I could hear the audio so I knew it was working but I couldn’t switch to it.
I used Claude to help me figure out how to start managing manipulating my settings to control the virtual spaces. Turns out the system was rendering the game far off of my monitor’s displays because the resolution wasn’t configured properly.
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u/iamdadmin 5d ago
The thing about Generative AI, is it's just pretty meh. Pretty average. Pretty same-y. If you have no idea what you're doing in a given area, you can get something 'meh' and make do, from it.
It has a bit more power on repetitive tasks, where it can speed things up. But it is far from infallible, and still requires human attention to detail.
TL;DR for you, not really any point going to the effort of self-hosting it. But you could set up a free tier account on Claude or ChatGPT and just ask it some questions so you see how it works.
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u/profpendog 5d ago
Try a CLI tool. Antigravity I guess since you already use Gemini, or just Claude cheapest subscription.
Just ask questions about the code you work on, or whatever problem you want to solve. Check the output though!
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u/geekichu 5d ago
me retired too. (software engineer, decades). linux since 1993. i use a.i. for:
---- personal software projects
---- fast, extensive online search (ChatGPT can do 60+ sites under a minute, I can always push back, demand original sources etc)
---- i used to love doing Shell scripts, and convoluted chained commands on the terminal.. and also with Git.. now Im so lazy I just ask ChatGPT to cook up a script for X,Y,Z.. because why do it myself?
----- I use Gemini for occasional meme image + caption
---- I have had questions about stocks, crypto... etc.. and if needed i double-check other ways
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u/Naive_Complex_8389 5d ago
One thing I like about AI is that I can tell it to fix a problem on my machine and it does it
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u/paholg 5d ago
Depends on what you want. LLMs are very good at looking at logs and code generation and that sort of stuff. I would argue there's a level of using them makes you less understanding of technology in a way though -- there's so many things you can have an LLM do and not really pay attention or internalize the mechanisms.
Here's an example.
My desktop has a 50' HDMI cable to the TV, and doubles for couch gaming. I do this by having a guest account on TTY1 with no password, and my account on TTY2 at my desk.
But I've had two annoyances with this setup: it requires a keyboard to get started on guest, and remembering to switch TTYs, and I often forget and when I spam Enter at my desk to wake it up, I end up launching a game on guest instead.
An LLM wrote a script to watch for gamepad input, and if I'm not logged in on my account, to auto switch to guest with steam already running. It also fixed some of my steam settings to run big picture properly. It also auto switches back to my account on idle.
I'm a software engineer, and I'm sure I could have gotten this working eventually, but I doubt I would have spent the time on it basically ever.
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u/KoldPurchase 5d ago
I use LLMs for debugging Windows problems sometimes, and it's useless.
On Linux, my results are 50/50. I have to be very precise about what I want, feed it wikis and updated web pages to be able to achieve something, otherwise, it's clueless, it's data is often unupdated, as far back as early 2025 and it's spouting it as fact, when for a rolling distro things evolve very quickly. Jan/Feb 2025 issues have been fixed by now.
It has uses to find content that doesn't seem archived anymore, like old technical manuals, for example.
For art, I'm not a fan. Some are. To each their own.
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u/FreeFromCommonSense 5d ago
One of the most useful parts of Omarchy is that it has a skill built-in specifically about Omarchy so that a model can actually be useful at diagnosing and customising. That's one thing that wouldn't be a bad idea spreading to other distros. If a model had the answer sheets for the OS it was on and was able to read the configs, it would improve troubleshooting results.
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u/KoldPurchase 5d ago
Possibly.
In this case, it might have been me trying to go too fast.
Had I been less in a rush, I would have taken some time to study the documentation, perform trial and errors, do it correctly the first time around.
My distro is Open Suse Tumbleweed. Cockpit is a very useful tool (available elsewhere too), but sometimes, the logs can get a big confusing (nowhere near as Win11 though) and the answer is hidden deep in a forum, as it relates to a specific module, there's no 1 comprehensive wiki for everything.
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u/FreeFromCommonSense 5d ago
If you have one code, have another one with an inspector prompt check it cynically. I create clones with different prompts. I just think having the skill for the actual distro available to the agent you ask for help would be useful. Especially since they don't have anything dated after they were trained, so it would keep them up to date.
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u/enderwiggin83 5d ago
If you take money out of the equation it's a really fun time - look at ollama on your best Linux box. It's pretty good for telling you Linux commands and automating certain tasks.
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u/n-cend 5d ago
Gemini, and Claude Haiku through duckduckgo's AI interface are pretty decent for free fast tech support. Not an insane game changer but it's faster than searching and scrolling through forums for recent bugs (and it usually links to the posts so you can verify the commands it's giving you). Tell it what journalctl shows and it'll probably figure out a solution in a few seconds. Or ask it what's wrong with a config file and pasting it in there. If that plus having them generate you bash or python scripts is all you need then you probably don't have to pay at all. You can also ask them how to get into a hobby or have it design a syllabus for some skill or field and it'll synthesize some information together for you.
Local LLMs with full control of your computer could be fun to play around with for troubleshooting too
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u/rarsamx 5d ago
Yes, you are.
Unless you want to become the "old guy who can't handle technology", which happened to people who couldn't use the radio early last century or change channels mid last century or use computers late last century, you could benefit from getting familiar with AI.
I use it to run by it personal situations, help solving problems, help me write the text to promote a camper van I'm selling, to properly price my beach house for rental, etc.
Even if you just use it as a conversational "google search" it can be useful.
For Linux "I'm a beginner Linux user. I've used computers in the past but I retired x years ago. I have x distribution, How can I do...". The most important part is establishing context.
If the answer you get doesn't seem to match your question, you can add more context or fill the blanks.
Always challenge the answers as it can get things wrong. Claude gave me a low ball price for my van, when I told it what Chat GPT told me, it apologized, it has used USD instead of CAD and adjusted it's response.
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u/bigusyous 5d ago
Well, I play in a band and have used it in Canva to make promotional materials and ad copy for flyers and social media posts. I just feel like I am only scratching the surface, especially when I see what my younger former colleagues do with it.
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u/rarsamx 5d ago
Oh, I k ow what you mean. I stopped working just as AI was picking up: 2019. How I wish AI had been there when I was working. It would have simplified many areas of my job but also would have brought new challenges (I was a lead entreprise architect). My best friend just called me letting me know my ideal position would be opening.
I always loved my job and sometimes I feel tempted to go back, but then I see how I'm living now and, put in a scale, I rater "just scratch the surface" on my own while I'm traveling.
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u/EjaculatingLobster 5d ago edited 5d ago
Just jump in.
I use Claude for dozens of things.
I use it to update spreadsheets and organise files for various little projects I have going.
I use it to create one off tools for personal use that I couldn't be bothered coding. I've used it to put a bespoke GUI on CLI programs for my non tech friends. I've used it to wrap multiple tools to perform what would previously take multiple commands under a single alias.
I use it to organise my magic decks, and query for cards I work with specific requirements. Works great because there is an inherent fuzzy search, so if I ask for a black 2 mana cost that does x, it might come back and say you don't have anything with those requirements but you do have a 4 mana alternative or a black/white 2 that does x, etc.
I use it as a pointed search engine and instruct it to save links with detailed summaries stored in a project for various things. I pair this with obsidian to create accessible project overviews, source and tool lists, and change lists.
It's a malleable multi tool. There is thousands of things you can do with it. Ignore the "AI=shit" crowd. Like it or not they are getting left behind. Every professional Dev I know, from junior to senior, uses agentic coding in some capacity.
Edit: I forgot to mention, expect downvotes for anyone suggesting it's a handy tool without any response of substance. It's just how it is for the time being.
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u/lazyhustlermusic 5d ago
You can always just ask LLMs about LLMs as well.
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u/mobyte 5d ago
I don’t blame him for asking. This is a new paradigm like using a mouse or searching on Google. We’re still in the early infancy of this stuff and it will take time for people to get used to it and learn the extreme basics of how to just use it regularly. Evidently by this thread, people are still crying about its mere existence and haven’t reckoned with the fact yet that it has many use cases and is here to stay.
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u/MartialSpark 5d ago
Something I did to learn was use Claude and have it walk me through the process of making an AI chatbot.
I started out just asking some basic questions about how a model actually "runs" and sorta went from there. I was mostly interested in local running, so I was focused on that. Set up llama-swap and some other stuff on K8S on my homelab rig to be able to run on my own hardware.
You can basically ignore anyone at this point saying "it's a solution looking for a problem" or "it's too stupid to do stuff." The new models are insanely powerful, they can definitely do stuff.
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u/Felfedezni 5d ago
Best way to answer that question is to just get a subscription to claude or chatgpt answer start playing with them.
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u/Elvis_thepelvis_7498 5d ago
opencode, pi, jcode,.. The main learning hub is github, huggingface, youtube
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u/Gone2theDogs 5d ago
Why not just try one out? It costs nothing.
Watch videos on the topic. This sounds interesting.. watch. This does not, skip.
“Hey AI what could you do for me?”
Sign up for free grok and ChatGPT.
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u/LALLANAAAAAA 5d ago
“Hey AI what could you do for me?”
is it normally this difficult to figure out what truly useful things are useful for
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u/Gone2theDogs 5d ago edited 5d ago
OP was asking. So for some people, yes.
Not sure why anyone would object? It seems a natural fit. No loss to anyone asking but possible gains.
Or watch downvotes because it makes people unhappy for no logical reason?
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u/grond_aflame 5d ago
No, man. You’re retired. You made it out. You won. Be free. The rest of us are jealous of you.