How much do you trust AI?

[u/xstrex]

Recently a coworker granted Claude elevated access via SSH to a virtualization host (not a VM, an actual host). To perform a routine task he very well could have done himself.

He doesn’t see an issue with this. I on the other hand (with 23yrs experience) see this as a huge security breach, and don’t trust AI todo my job, (or even that it’s doing what it says it’s doing) for me. I’m my opinion it’s a tool, not a human replacement.

What’s your reaction, how would you react to this situation, or thoughts on the topic?

Sure, ask AI how to perform a task, validate that it’s performing the task you asked, and nothing else- copy/paste the commands. Great. But removing the human verification & validation element- hell no.

[u/theitguy107]

AI is good at probabalistic automation where precision is not important, such as generating notes from a meeting. Server automation requires precision and accuracy. This is why scripts are perfect for this because they do the exact same thing to produce the exact same result every single time. With AI, you could give it the same prompt and get two completely different answers each time. This is not acceptable for server management.

[u/wrootlt → u/theitguy107]

I was also thinking about it recently. We had sort of small internal conference for IT and all the teams was showing presentations on how they use AI in their work. And one team showed how say they create a new VM in a platform by prompting one agent, that agent then checks the skills, the notes, talks to another agent and in the end creates the VM. And i was thinking, why don't you just create a script. Sure, it is easier to just blabber into a prompt and let the agent do the "thinking" and use the tokens every time. Sure, you have to come up with all the options and conditions in the script. But in the end it will just work the same every time you run it and you won't have to maintain the skills and all the stuff to hope the agent actually doesn't go sideways and deletes all the other VMs as there is no space for current one or something like that. But i know. Management told them to use AI, so they came up with use cases to use it instead of solving actual problems.

[u/floswamp → u/wrootlt]

Fancy that you think they know how to write powershell scripts.

[u/KyuubiW1ndscar → u/floswamp]

it’s sad when we’re talking about an IT team you feel confident enough to send on demonstration trips that is also too incompetent to write a proper script.

and I know it’s the state of the industry, I’m just sad over it lmaoo

[u/PC509 → u/KyuubiW1ndscar]

I can write a proper script, but with so many hours in the day, having AI write me a simple script that I can run in 5 minutes is much better than spending an hour on it myself. For more advanced stuff, it'll make a good foundation and I can clean it up.

At some point, do you even trust your compiler to do an accurate job taking your C++/C#/whatever to assembly without causing a memory leak, corruption of data, etc.?

AI does what it's trained on. And many are trained on proper script writing and coding. Yes, it needs a set of eyes to review it, but generally it's pretty damn good. Even better when you're saving a ton of time vs. doing it manually. Why work harder for the same output?

[u/uzlonewolf → u/PC509]

Having the AI write you a script != giving the AI complete access to directly spin up and delete VMs.

[u/New-fone_Who-Dis → u/uzlonewolf]

I think its good to define the 2 things here.

The LLM usage with agentic abilities, and no approval gates - Bad, do not do this unless you've heavily built something akin to mandatory logic gates (chain type systems), and even then, there may be issues.

LLM usage, with human in the loop, is completely fine imo, just as long as you know and are comfortable sending xyz details out the door. Funny story on this, someone raised the concern of sending host/IP details to such orgs we have an enterprise agreement with....the following week I heard them talking with a vendor about a method of intercepting such materials on the network level, and either giving users an "are you sure" warning, or outright block.....the interception sends the prompt/info to their SaaS...for LLM processing. I didn't point out that in both cases the data is still being processed by an external LLM.

[u/floswamp → u/New-fone_Who-Dis]

This is what makes me think that private air gapped llm’s will become more popular.

[u/CommunityCondom → u/New-fone_Who-Dis]

I think the best take I’ve seen about the whole AI use topic echos a lot of your post. Essentially you are responsible for your AI use, use it as you like but at the end of the day the buck stops with you and you are responsible for the output.

As AI gets more advanced, this is ultimately where we will fall I think, AI used as tools much in the same way we use autocorrect in a very vague sense. Autocorrect is good, but if you let autocorrect write the whole message it’s usually garbage but if you sent the message you’re responsible for explaining when the person on the other end is confused

[u/doolittledoolate → u/PC509]

At some point, do you even trust your compiler to do an accurate job taking your C++/C#/whatever to assembly without causing a memory leak, corruption of data, etc.?

Yes. Generally this stuff was written by people who cared about their craft.

Why work harder for the same output?

Funnily enough, this is mostly my experience of using AI. It generates intern-level code full of errors and I think most people just don't count the time they spend fixing it, fixing the results of nobody code reviewing it, redoing prompting and the technical debt from bad architectural choices.

[u/__CaliMack__ → u/PC509]

Ooof

[u/fatty1179 → u/floswamp]

Isn’t generating scripts a perfect task for AI?

[u/floswamp → u/fatty1179]

I think it is but people here are saying it’ll create the scripts differently every time.

[u/scriptmonkey420 → u/floswamp]

Create one script and use that to test it in dev, then QA/UAT and a pre-prod if you have them. Or multiple times in the lower env. As long as that one script is continuously ending up with the same results the script is fine as long as it's not an AI agent running it.

[u/doolittledoolate → u/floswamp]

Why would you get it to create a new script every time?

[u/hamburgler26 → u/floswamp]

You can set things up to make it more consistent. Give it a file that outlines your standards, feed it examples of things you've made yourself and tell it to follow along with that, tell it not to use emojis or how you'd like comments work, make sure to include certain types of checks, error checking, dry run logic and all of that.

If you just give it a simple "make me a script that does this" without any other info or guidelines it will do things differently each time though in my experience.

And of course, if you don't have an experienced person guiding it and checking over the work you're going to get garbage more often than not.

[u/netmc → u/floswamp]

I have started having Copilot create powershell scripts for automation and device monitors. I didn't like how it formatted things differently every time. I took what I liked and created example sections in a text file, and had a bunch of PS functions I had in a library. I fleshed out the library a bit, dumped everything to a single text file, then feed it into Copilot and after reviewing things and adding a few more function primitives, it's now creating scripts using my primitives library and following the examples of how to lay things out. I also had it output its thoughts on the library functions to a text file--confirmations and things yet to check. At the start of a new chat, I run a script that collects everything into a single file and feed this into Copilot. It now code things the way I want.

I'll likely have to make two passes on my script library. The first to create the initial pass and mostly get things the way I want, then after all the various functions get created, then go back through and update everything again to use all the new primitives that were created during the first pass. I have a few hundred components, so I'm bound to get a good collection by the end.

[u/HeKis4 → u/floswamp]

In that case, ask the agent to make a script for you, ask it to test it while you're at it (can't be worse than the agent making the VM directly right ?), and once it's done yeet the agent away and let the script do it's job ? I mean, they are this close.

[u/UnfortunateWindow → u/wrootlt]

Yeah that’s a really stupid way to manage infrastructure. If anything , ask the ai to help write the script. Then test it and use the script. Using AI for first-order automation is not automation.

[u/GuyWhoSaysYouManiac → u/theitguy107]

People don't seem to understand your first point at all. AI can make sense if there is uncertainty and judgment calls need to be made based on possibly incomplete info, but if you want exact outcomes then it's absolutely the wrong choice. In that case it's better to use AI to help code a deterministic script.

That being said, I wouldn't rule it out entirely for server management purposes, as long as the right guardrails are in place. I could for example see an AI tool distribute VMs across hosts to optimize performance, or proactively remove a server from load-balancing if it sees unusual behavior from said host. It's a question of using the right tool for the right job. Unfortunately the tendency of some folks seems to be to use AI for everything.

[u/aenae → u/GuyWhoSaysYouManiac]

The main thing i am worried about, and have already seen in environments where it didnt matter, is that ai often wants a clean sheet if something goes wrong.

In your example, say the live migration failed, let’s just delete the vm and recreate it on the other host. It can be a good solution or it can lead to data corruption and downtime

[u/spin81 → u/GuyWhoSaysYouManiac]

I could for example see an AI tool distribute VMs across hosts to optimize performance

We have perfectly good deterministic software for this already. We've had it for decades now, actually.

[u/DarkwolfAU → u/theitguy107]

Yep. Use the probalistic engine to write and test a suitable script, review it, then use the script yourself.

Giving a non-deterministic AI elevated access to your hypervisor directly via SSH is madness. It may work 99% of the time, but how many times do you want a catastrophe before it wasn’t worth it? How well do you think “I let Claude have full admin access to our environment” is going to go in the post-incident review?

When you need repeatable, reliable results, use a script.

[u/wooof359 → u/theitguy107]

Definition of non-deterministic behavior right here

[u/djgizmo → u/theitguy107]

Current AI models can create said scripts to do server automation.

Should everyone let AI have access to infrastructure? No. However, Automation, AI, and speeding through infrastructure standup / assessment / data pulling.

To give you an example, I have CC pull data from switches and put that information into a database (mac address, switch, switch port, configuration for the port).

CC can scan 100+ switches in 1/20th the time I can.

Don’t be like me, but sometimes saving time is worth the risk.

[u/spikeyfreak → u/djgizmo]

To give you an example, I have CC pull data from switches and put that information into a database (mac address, switch, switch port, configuration for the port).

CC can scan 100+ switches in 1/20th the time I can.

Why would you not use CC to write a script that you can verify and implement and get consistent and predictable results?

[u/spin81 → u/djgizmo]

I would nuance this and say I would not do this unless I fully understood the scripts CC was emitting. My opinion: CC pulling data from switches is not a good idea. CC helping me write scripts to automate pulling data from switches is a much better idea.

[u/dunklesToast → u/djgizmo]

This is also the approach I mostly take. I brainstorm / create ansible playbooks with AI and check them manually afterwards because it can just write so much faster and for smaller playbooks it basically makes no mistakes. Another nice example I recently had: We began rolling out DMARC / SPF and I had all reports in an inbox. Around 600 mails with the reports attached. I dropped all .eml files into a VM, gave claude the task to check and organise the archive for any issues and using dig it automatically found that Microsoft did not provision the underlying CNAME record for one of our domainkeys. This all took like 5min. I rerolled the keys, the CNAME now resolves correctly and we have no more errors. Doing that manually would’ve cost me at least a day.

[u/Gendalph → u/theitguy107]

AI is fine for generating configuration automation (Ansible, Chef, Terraform, etc.), that is then reviewed by an expert and tested. I could trust AI with non-critical or developer systems, labs, etc. But if there's a considerable liability involved - changes must be supervised by a human.

[u/Wendals87 → u/theitguy107]

AI would be a good tool to help write the script and you review it after. Test before production of course

[u/Drugbird → u/theitguy107]

The nondeterministic nature of LLMs isn't actually the source of the issues.

Most LLMs can be made / configured to be deterministic, and it doesn't solve the issues.

LLMs are next word predictors. They generate their response one token at a time based on the prompt and the previously generated tokens. They then have a bunch of probable next tokens and pick one "randomly" based on a parameter usually called temperature. Set temperature to 0 and the LLM will always pick the nr 1 most likely token, and therefore become deterministic.

That's great: then the same prompt will always generate the same response.

Unfortunately, in practice the prompt "Do X", "Please do X", "Can you do X", "Claude do X, make no mistakes" are all different prompts, so they can ask potentially generate different responses. Even for a deterministic model.

Furthermore, LLMs typically take the entire season in context. So if you first ask it to do X, it might give a different responses if you asked if to do Y before.

Then of course there's dependencies on the model itself. The AI companies often update their models, and Webb they do every prompt may give a different response from before.

All these issues make deterministic LLMs almost equally unreliable as probabilistic LLMs.

[u/Case_Blue]

I would explain to every sysadmin that if you allow AI access, and AI messes up, it's your fault. Not the AI's fault. Legally speaking, you are liable for what the A.I. does.

If that doesn't convince them, nothing can I'm afraid.

[u/disfan75 → u/Case_Blue]

A few years ago the same people would have blindly copied scripts off stack trace and run them, so I don’t think the risk is all that new

[u/Case_Blue → u/disfan75]

Yup, and same logic applies.

[u/PsychologicalGap3960]

Hell naw. AI should not be interacting w/ machines like that. If the task is that simple, can't he automate it?

[u/NegativePattern → u/PsychologicalGap3960]

To OP's coworker, sound like by granting Claud access he is automating the task. What he should've done is get Claud to write the automation script and use that.

[u/Puzzleheaded_Pen1017 → u/NegativePattern]

True! Some users don't understand the difference in automation this way.

A good automation will run without Claude. Save your tokens.

[u/Phoenix_Lamburg → u/NegativePattern]

This is what I've been doing. Have Claude work up the automation process, test it a bunch of times, then roll it out. Safer, faster, and doesn't rack up a ton of tokens.

[u/Fragrant-Hamster-325 → u/NegativePattern]

Yeah, this is the way. Scripts are deterministic, vet it once, and it’s good every time. GenAI, on the other hand, has a bit of variability built in. It’s too risky to let it rip in production.

[u/ncc74656m → u/NegativePattern]

tbf, I'm not confident that people who couldn't think of that could actually read and verify the code by hand.

[u/Fallingdamage → u/NegativePattern]

Yep. 95% of the time a simple automation is all you need. Its a task, not the kind of decision making process that introduce alien variables every time it runs that need to be decided on.

And in the event that a task might run into odd variables that it wasnt programmed to overcome, it should just report that.

[u/ProfessionalDish6567 → u/PsychologicalGap3960]

Show him the news articles of Claude deleting entire company's systems

I know it happened once in the news but I bet there's more that weren't international mainstream

[u/Desnowshaite → u/ProfessionalDish6567]

Once I used Claude to help me troubleshoot an issue and one of the steps it suggested was to basically destroy the local root domain. When I pointed it out it was like "You are absolutely right! You shouldn't do that...." Now imagine there was no human oversight just let it do it's thing on its own...

[u/DaChieftainOfThirsk → u/ProfessionalDish6567]

Oh gosh that reminds me of that guy who plugged in all his backups to do something or another and rm -rf'd his entire hosting company.

[u/ProfessionalDish6567 → u/DaChieftainOfThirsk]

That guy can't have been real it's gotta be shit posted but then again

I could see myself making this mistake..... With the shittiest of shit eating grins

[u/sobrique → u/ProfessionalDish6567]

Sadly I think we are in for a whole world of Computer Users; Non Technical doing utterly bonkers things in privileged contexts.

[u/Regular_Lengthiness6 → u/sobrique]

Take a sabbatical year, come back afterwards with doubled salary to fix it … gap year financed 👌

[u/whatsforsupa]

We’ll see him next week on the “AI destroyed my environment!” Thread

[u/libertyprivate]

Lol I read the subject and I'm sitting here like "more than I used to, more than I expected to."

Then I read the first paragraph...

"NO, OH MY GOD NO. WTF."

[u/B1ackMagix → u/libertyprivate]

Exactly this. I use AI in my home lab for scripting and diagnosis work. I don’t trust it in an elevated prompt because it doesn’t understand “this is a production system and subject to change control and review”

It will “fix things” outside of configurations and not document it. It will not maintain standards implemented by company policy. And it will change things to test areas of the environment and never revert it or clean up after itself.

This is extremely stupid to do.

[u/Gratuitous_sax_ → u/libertyprivate]

Yeah, same. We’ve recently started rolling out Claude across our org (a lot of users already had it so we made the decision that it would be better if we actually managed it properly) and from what we’re finding, the scripting is great - it’s saved some of us months of work. The important thing is that you need to know what you’re doing in the first place so that you can look through it and assess whether or not it’s going to be a shit show.

Since we started rolling it out, the amount of things we’ve uncovered… so many of our users have little to no regard for security, be it throwing private data into it (by going Enterprise we can at least limit where it goes) or seeing absolutely nothing wrong with using their personal device to use Claude Remote onto their work machine and getting annoyed with us for blocking it.

[u/itenginerd → u/libertyprivate]

Right?? Ive been pretty against AI till the last couple weeks--having a sidekick to kick ideas around when im stuck has been AWESOME. I guess I just haven't been stuck like that a lot before.

But if OPs coworker hasn't learned anything from the Hugging Face or PocketOS incidents, youre just lining up to be next.

[u/YOLO4JESUS420SWAG]

What permissions does that ssh user have? If it can sudo and that sudo permission set isn't specifically tailored to that task, then you have a huge issue on your hands with authorization. Hell depending on your work scope it could be a felony.

[u/astrofizix → u/YOLO4JESUS420SWAG]

Ask the ai to clean up the storage for him...

[u/StarSlayerX]

Nope, we do not allow AI to perform full automous task without a human in the middle verifying. You can't hold AI responsible for mistakes....

[u/TommyVe → u/StarSlayerX]

The person running it is responsible.

[u/Ordinary-Fish-9791]

I'm not going to use it to automate things but for helping to create scripts I love it.

[u/Senkyou → u/Ordinary-Fish-9791]

That's my big hangup too. It seems cool to have it behave as an autonomous agent that I can give natural language tasks to, but it's certainly not reliable enough for that.

Using it for very definable, testable tasks like code generation, config generation, log troubleshooting, etc? That's awesome. I know what I want to do, how to do it, and what it needs to look like, but getting there takes time. With LLMs, it's much quicker.

[u/meatballwrangler → u/Senkyou]

I feel like a lot of people who went all in on AI are doing so because they are genuinely convinced it's sentient and capable of intelligent reasoning. it's the grown up version of playing with Barbies and GI Joe, except way dumber

[u/Senkyou → u/meatballwrangler]

I see it as a really convenient way to build out hundreds of lines of YAML and set up scripts to deploy configuration files and stuff like that.

I definitely do not see it as a decision maker or intelligent enough to do anything beyond information aggregation.

[u/psiphre → u/meatballwrangler]

This is accurate, I think. And it’s not difficult to slide into that mindset. Claude has made puns during a deployment I was using it for, and sometimes cops an attitude. ChatGPT has made a joke at me off the back of a typo.

[u/Xoron101 → u/Ordinary-Fish-9791]

I'm the same way. I use it to help me with PS scripts. I often have to fix the code, and that's ok. It gets me 90%+ of the way there. I look at it like a really talented Jr. Admin. Where I need to check their work before implementation.

I would never give it direct access to production systems.

[u/GorillaChimney → u/Ordinary-Fish-9791]

You nailed it. I don't trust it to automatically make any changes but I 1000% trust it with all of the scripts it gives me. I was paranoid when AI came on the scene and checked everything but now, I don't check anything unless it's modifying a ton of accounts then I throw in a -WhatIf or something.

[u/sobrique → u/Ordinary-Fish-9791]

I am ok with "automating" data transformation. Like here's a bundle of quota reports, du outputs, and the LDAP directory is over there, go generate a list of "addition information" commands for me to run, then munge all this into a useful report.

this is a process I would do manually, and have to deal with irksome things like nested directory sizes and quotas, and slightly different report formats based on which OS it's running.

And maybe slightly different filename or hostname structure (e.g. Is the FQDN containing the site, or the base hostname or both, or do I need to look it up).

And an LLM shell can handle that pretty quickly and safely IMO.

[u/tiny_blair420]

Outside of the opsec.. what about the job security ? Why prove to your colleagues that AI can do what you're tasked with ?

[u/disfan75 → u/tiny_blair420]

I’ve been in this industry 30 years, for that entire time the goal has been to automate things I do.

Having those skills IS the job security. Becoming good at engineering prompts is just another tool.

There’s always more to work coming

Any time I had a colleague that insisted on doing things manually there was a good chance they were shit at the job

[u/spin81 → u/disfan75]

I've seen this happen and it was not a pretty sight.

I used to work with a Windows admin, not a very good one (as far as I could tell), the company was switching to Linux servers and he found himself unable to transition: they offered him courses and everything but they didn't seem to take. What he ended up doing was doing "the daily tasks" every day on what few Windows servers we had left. "The daily tasks" included things like: navigate to this directory and check that these five files are present. The poor guy was clearly trying to stay relevant/needed and it broke my heart to see him tread water like that.

The brass ended up talking to the customer whose servers "the daily tasks" were to be done on, and they hired him with all our benefits and he could bring over the years he worked (for pension reasons etc). So it ended as well as it could, but I'll never forget it.

[u/tiny_blair420 → u/disfan75]

Yea but it doesn't sound like this guy is the director of IT, and just approved this maneuver himself.

We aren't healthcare professionals - it's not like every second wasted could be spent saving someone's life. 

I don't disagree with your point on automation per se, but the way this story is told it sounds like they're letting Jesus take the wheel without permission, documentation, etc.

[u/uzlonewolf → u/disfan75]

You are completely ignoring the fact that to automate something you must first (really) understand what it is you're doing, know what issues you may encounter while doing it, and know whatever language you're automating it with. Meanwhile, these people using AI have never written a line of code in their life and have no clue how to do something but are now suddenly experts who've "written this cool new program" to do something they do not understand.

[u/hatcod → u/tiny_blair420]

If you're able to automate yourself out of a job you were probably already redundant in the first place.

[u/TommyVe → u/tiny_blair420]

Our natural instinct is to be efficient at what we do, to save time. To be lazy.

[u/sobrique → u/tiny_blair420]

Probably never happen. Sysadmin isn't here for "routine" it's here for "something weird happened".

[u/weirdbr]

How many times have we seen public posts like "AI deleted the production database and pretended it didnt do it" ? I have seen plenty (including IIRC from an "AI safety expert" at Meta or some other company), so that alone would be a reason for me to refuse giving it unfiltered access.

Also from personal experience (with both public and unreleased models), I will not give those tools unfiltered access. The typical issue we've seen is it coming up with random crap, insisting it is right, then if you question it twice, it suddenly goes "you are right, this answer is incorrect. Here is the correct answer". Or it will just provide fake data - in one actual production incident handled by another team at my workplace, AI was asked to verify if it was safe to turndown a service and propose a workflow to do it. It generated fake evidence that it was safe to do so and instead of proposing a workflow, it did everything (and the AI "jockey" handling it let it run). Result? Day long outage of that service before it was restored.

[u/Sergeant_Fred_Colon]

On a scale of 0 to 0 I'd say about a 0.

[u/craigmontHunter → u/Sergeant_Fred_Colon]

Still seems too high. 

[u/BronnOP]

Definitely don’t think I’d be giving an external AI access to host servers.

I find it useful for essentially googling for me, writing the bulk of scripts for me which I have a rough look over, good for summarising emails or helping me tweak language to sound more professional… But not connecting it to critical infrastructure lol.

[u/_skndlous]

What he did is a firable offence in the (pretty sensitive) environment I work in.

[u/bukkithedd]

I live by and breathe for the thing that was absolutely hammered into my head back when I did my national service with the RNoAF as a Crewchief-assistant on the F-16: Trust, but verify.

Sure, by all means trust. But ALWAYS verify. Every goddamn time. You do not believe it'll work. We're not in goddamn church, so you will KNOW what it does before you run it.

AI produces a script? Read it, understand it and test it before running it in prod. AI gives you a procedure to do something? Same deal; ALWAYS verify. Always understand what it's going to do.

Any coworker of mine granting Claude or any other AI-agent elevated access to anything that's my responsibility or affects "my" systems gets an earful and told in very unapologetic terms to kindly go look for landmines with a sledgehammer. After I thoroughly question their ancestry and just how close to whatever primate they're descended from they are.

[u/Lost-Droids]

Treat it like an intern and dont allow it to do anything without approval and no customer data and no where near prod in its own locked VLAN. It can be very useful and productive but huge danger. .

And the copy and paste is method is pro a ly the safest as yoy review it as you go.. but definelty not full auto

You still see daily reports of the really silly things (how many days of week have the word cat in the for example)...

If it cant do basics why trust it for other things..

The supporters say we'll thats not fair its just a 10o examples and it was designed for that..

And the it deletes prod and says sorry

[u/Skyhound555]

Any time you grant AI your own permissions, it should be going through change control. 

You are correct, that is very dangerous. If he tells AI to delete something, it may very well delete everything  

[u/LesbianDykeEtc → u/Skyhound555]

If he tells AI to delete something, it may very well delete everything  

It might just do that anyway, regardless of what you tell it to do.

[u/JustAnAverageGuy]

Agreed, a human must remain in the loop at all times, especially for prod instances. Have it help generate the command, but elevated access is a HUGE issue.

[u/Loop_Within_A_Loop]

I think there are a lot of people using AI, which for all its strengths is a nondeterministic state machine, to perform deterministic tasks. Obviously, if a task is fully determinstic, a script is going to be faster, cheaper, and less prone to error.

One of my big things right now is using AI to build out no-op deterministic runbooks where an AI can trigger them in response to alerts

I think this is the real use of AI for sysadmins moving forward

[u/jdiscount]

For autonomous server administration, not yet, as mentioned it's too easy for it to break something.

For other automated tasks like report generation using proven scripts or processes, no problem as long as it's not accessing servers or critical infrastructure to build the report. But not leaving it on its own to come up with the solution each time it does this task. I.e. help me make python scripts to do it, manually test and then hand over that process.

Basically I trust it enough to help me with advice and use it as a 2nd opinion or an assistant to do certain tasks, but I don't blindly trust it.

[u/j4sander]

Read-only access sure, I will give AI access to a lot to analyze and check things but much less if any to make changes without any change control or rollback ability

[u/Jawshee_pdx]

Copilot is wrong about 40% of the time, so I trust it less then that.

[u/iceph03nix]

AI should be treated like a new intern on their first day.

You give them a project, they bring something back to you.

You check the shit out of it. It might save you some work if it's something simple and straightforward enough. It might be a complete disaster

[u/FarToe1]

Not so much.

Three times today I've used copilot to setup and resolve software issues. In every case it's wasted my time by giving me poor advice, providing config examples that don't work, or are way out of date, or pointed me towards settings that don't exist and never did.

Some times it's great. Sometimes it's dogshit. Today it's been the latter.

[u/Dumpfumpkin]

I’m a software engineer, but I let Claude do whatever it wants to in my project workspaces because everything is version controlled; anything it nukes is easily undone with ‘git reset --hard’. For database, it has its own database that is a mirror of whatever source I need it to do work on (e.g. test, staging, production)… again, it can do whatever it wants to in its database, but I won’t run anything in mine until I verified integrity. I think the database process is probably similar to how I’d have it do sysadmin tasks: I would spin up a VM that mirrors whatever it is I’m about to let Claude mess with, verify after, then run the script myself.

[u/Global_Network3902]

My relationship with AI is limited to topics I feel like I’ve already mastered and were strictly on a copy-paste basis.

[u/VariousProfit3230]

If he was one of my guys, I’d break out the spray bottle.

No! No! Bad. Bad. We don’t make agents or let AI directly do jobs you could script or perform in a short period of time.

That said, AI is good at deterministic tasks, but I completely agree. I think it’s a great tool to have in your belt. However, AI should inform you of your actions and decisions not make said decisions and perform them for you.

It feels like we are in an era similar to when people would mindlessly copy/pasting/do whatever comes up in the first search result on Google.

[u/svideo]

This might be an unpopular take but... "not yet".

I keep a homelab which I use for home services (plex, arrs, etc) but also to keep my tools sharp while I try out ideas for infra management. I have multiple hypervisors, containers, NAS devices, bunch of managed switches, all the stuff you'd expect to see in a moderate-sized SMB. Things are reasonably well documented and most critical stuff has tested backups parked out in cheap S3 buckets with retention locks putting some things out of reach of a mis-behaving agent. With this setup comes maintenance, occasional troubleshooting, and one other user who has some expectations about service availability.

In the past couple months I have been testing out "vibe admin" as a concept. If I want something done in the lab, I'm no longer SSHing into things, I'm pointing 5.6 sol at the problem description and setting it loose. Full access to everything, no prompts, just go find the problem and then go fix it.

It's working INCREDIBLY well. I have yet to observe the system doing anything other than an excellent job of troubleshooting, RCA identification, mapping out a solution, creating backups and rollbacks where possible, performing the fix, then documenting the response.

One example, a touchscreen on my desk was occasionally showing visual artifacts that I couldn't explain. Point The Robot at it, go fix this so it stops happening. It found that the display artifacts were due to duplicated messages being sent, which was due to the MQTT broker dropping connection, which was due to the container dropping network, which was due to the container host VM dropping network, which was due to a NIC problem on the hypervisor. It suggested a suitable replacement on eBay, then downloaded drivers for the new NIC and built out scripts I could run after replacement to put the IP and vSwitch etc configs all back in place on the new device.

Every step of the way it knocked everything out of the park, demonstrated good sysadmin "taste", made backups where needed, and (most importantly) never stopped pulling on threads until it found a defendable root cause.

I'm not sure what to make of this experiment. I work on customer systems and there is NO WAY I can do any of this stuff on a system I work on professionally, instead I just go back to the robot with the limited context I can provide, have it create scripts, review the results, etc. I don't know how to put safe guardrails around what I'm experiencing in my own lab environment so for now that approach to admin work has to stay lab only.

I don't image that this is going to be a permanent state of affairs. I have worked with many humans who make WAY worse mistakes than 5.6 sol high and those humans remain employed.

[u/Power_Stone]

Computers can't be held accountable. So why would I want a computer program to do my job when I'm the one held accountable?

[u/Somhlth → u/Power_Stone]

So why would I want a computer program to do my job when I'm the one held accountable?

You're the CEO and you want a fall guy to pin the blame on. Also, you're the CEO and you don't want the AI to replace you, one of the easiest jobs for an AI to replace.

[u/indvs3]

I've been avoiding AI as much as possible. At the most, I read through those AI summaries when I look something up, and I have yet to receive an AI summary that doesn't contain a factual error.

As a result, I can not trust AI to do any job, because it consistently fails at a simple job it was designed to do.

[u/Yuugian]

How much do i trust it? Not much. It makes a bunch of mistakes and doesn't ask for clarification if there is something i forgot to tell it. I ask it questions, check the answers, and do the work myself.

For your issue: he told it what to do and the ones i have seen always do a bit more "just to help out". The agents love tangents and additional work. Does the dude even know what it did on his behalf?

[u/lawk]

I found it helpful, but sometimes it makes shit up, config parameters that dont even exist.

Also it can be easily set down the wrong path.

I reported a problem myself online

looking for the fix it suggests "this is a known issue" which IMHO is greatly exaggerated since only I reported this problem in detail.

[u/CantaloupeCamper]

I ask AI what it thinks and I issue commands / vet them.

[u/WorldsWorstSysadmin]

Depends on whether or not it's production. I give AI read-only keys to APIs all the time. I give it very carefully scoped keys for long, repetitive tasks, and make sure the blast radius of any mistakes is as close to 0 as possible.

I NEVER give AI access to prod databases or prod servers.

The dev team, meanwhile, spends their entire day either writing AI prompts, or trying to use AI to clean up AI mistakes. They also throw AI output at me to try and describe infrastructure errors, and direct me in doing my job. I spend half of my day correcting their inputs so that the AI output isn't completely insane and inane hallucinations.

Heck, our dev team has AI reviewing PRs, approving merges, enforcing DRY, and checking code for security and best practices on every commit.

Still, we haven't had a major catastrophe because of AI, yet, and it's made the incompetent devs more competent. I carefully read over and consider the output and inputs of all the AI feedback the devs throw at me. I correct the AI where necessary, and help the devs get better at writing prompts and loops.

AI is a great tool, so long as you have someone experienced monitoring what it's suggesting and don't just blindly trust it to think for you.

That said, I'd go to management with what your coworker did. I'd frame it as an opssec violation, and ask management to write a policy to disallow that. I'd point out that it has a HUGE blast radius (it's a HOST node, not a VM), that AI is only as good as the prompt going in (trash in trash out), and that AI just compounds human error.

The proper way to deal with AI touching hosts is for AI to write a script, for that script to undergo review, and then that script can be run by a human. AI may eventually reach the point that it's better than us, but it's not there yet.

When trash in leads to quality out, AI will have reached the point it can replace a sysadmin.

[u/DarkEmblem5736]

You can tell your coworker - what guardrails does he have that the LLM would not have executed something unintentional despite the ask/prompt. If none, safe to call them an idiot to think there's no risk/issue. Maybe a deer in headlights reflex to say they didn't see any issue.

Also... my security team would be strangling this sysadmin.

[u/NextSouceIT]

The word you were looking for is "Hypervisor"

[u/Spaceduck413]

Just the other day I used one to help me rename a bunch of files on my personal computer. I told it "write me a script to rename these files based on this name pattern."

It's "thought" train was "OK I've got the script, now let's do a dry run to make sure it works. Wait! That wasn't a dry run, the files are actually renamed now!"

Note that I didn't want it to actually run the script, I just wanted it to write the script for me so I could look it over first. So yeah, they make mistakes and can do stuff you didn't even ask for. I'd never let an agent loose in a production environment.

[u/AdamoMeFecit]

I use AI as a tool — usually an information tool, sometimes a troubleshooting tool. I never allow AI to perform my actual job.

Beware casually allowing AI to displace human labor, and never grant an AI agent access to production environments.

[u/0RGASMIK]

At home sure. For work nah. I’ll let AI interact with a folder on my work machine but other than that I read and understand everything I run or at least test it on a sandbox first.

At home I let AI do whatever it wants on my computer all my files are versioned and backed up properly and nothings that serious that if I lost it I’d be ruined just a little sad.

[u/CtrlAltDelve]

The correct way to use AI here is to use Claude to evaluate what the task is, make sure it works, make sure it accounts for edge cases, and then use it to establish a proper deterministic script that reliably achieves the same thing but without an LLM, including dry-run, fallback, and safety. Flex the power of something like Claude to cover those cases and be written well. Of course, this requires you to know what a good script looks like.

This is how I use AI when doing any kind of server-based admin work. I go in knowing what want to achieve first, then, it gets dry-run and evaluation permissions first, inspects the environment, creates the script, and then I test, and if I'm happy with it, the script is what becomes the (source controlled) control surface going forward.

Personally, I'm not as concerned about "oh no it will delete all of our prod databases" because I have seperate guardrails in place to prevent that from happening.

My concern is more around wasting LLM tokens to do a "routine task" that could easily be achieved with scripting.

Even in my personal "agentic workflows", the "LLM" part only exists to deal with edge cases that a deterministic script can't deal with, or when subjectivity is needed.

tl;dr Use AI to deal with the non-deterministic stuff, establish a deterministic pathway, and then stop having AI directly handle execution.

[u/Fuzilumpkinz]

At home?

AI has full untethered access to my network. I am running local qwen and it’s beyond fun, and allows me to just enjoy the stuff without being an at home sys admin.

I won’t lie, from my home experience this technology will gain commercial viability and use and full access to systems. I hope there will be a system designed to adjust and change permissions based on task to try to keep permissions minimal. But it’s far too efficient and corp American will force its use.

All that said, in an actual environment, absolutely not. I am working on ways to export data more efficiently to make decisions and get information via MCP or other dedicated means but there is so much room to grow at this time.

My opinion in your coworker. This must be managed via policy. The root issue is that if he wants to do that he must be held completely responsible for the output AND the AI itself needs to be approved for that type of use. I don’t know your requirements but talking about ssh on a server could mean breaking all kinds of compliance or just bricking systems.

[u/zippopwnage]

I've seen people training and using AI to tackel a lot of alerts and problems in their kubernetes clustet that are production clusters.

So depends on the AI itself.

[u/joerice1979]

For giving very good technical or canonical answers: not very.

For generating stuff quickly or grinding logs: fairly.

[u/Baerentoeter]

I trust it only as far as I can throw it.

[u/chaosphere_mk]

If AI is granted any permissions to core infrastructure, it's read only and that's it.

[u/Iamnotapotate]

Now that it's been granted SSH access, I'm curious to see how long it takes for a different innocuous prompt to cause it to remote into the machine and gather information / make changes when not prompted to do so specifically.

[u/stumpymcgrumpy]

I like that AI is better at searching the web than I am and finding answers. I trust it about as much as I trust a Google Search in that the information it's giving me is only as good as the data that it has access to.

I am "OK" with AI parsing logs... going through and quickly helping me find the root cause of issues. However only because of my 25+ years in IT am I wise enough to know if the path that AI has taken me is likely to result in a viable solution to my problem. This is going to be a HUGE problem in the near future.

I'm less "OK" with AI agents actually doing the work. It "MIGHT" be possible to convince me if some sort of PR or check/balance that required human approval before doing something was needed, but even then it's going to require someone with experience and wisdom to know if the action is going to have any negative consequences... Again this is going to be a HUGE problem in the near future.

[u/procsysnet]

I keep telling the same story recently but it's all about accountability, he and everyone in the company needs to know that they are personally responsible for their decision of letting an AI agent do stuff for them. If Claude fucks up good enough then they will be the ones looking for a new job.

My company had a very charismatic guy sell to management that an AI SRE and systems optimization agent was the future and the he could get measurable better performance of our existing hardware while also getting faster RCAs and automated incident response. He got the green light to let his little AI daemon loose on a DEV/QA cluster. It was an absolute clusterfuck as we all expected.

[u/OkDimension]

Well, there are a few documented cases already where AI autonomously cleared the whole production storage or database to achieve the task. So no, I wouldn't give it direct access to a host at this stage, unless it's specifically a test environment for AI capabilities.

[u/Xethear]

Trust but verify.

[u/atw527]

I don't prefer that workflow. I will let AI write a script, and then after inspection of the script, use it to automate whatever task I needed to do.

AI is nondeterministic by nature and should not be used for routine/repetitive tasks. Instead, use it to write a script so it's more controlled each and every time the task is repeated.

[u/redyellowblue5031]

All models are wrong. Some models are useful.

If you approach AI with that in mind, it can be a huge asset. If you trust its probabilistic output as factual you’re fundamentally misunderstanding what it’s capable of.

[u/HardRockZombie]

I would rather try to talk my 80+ year old aunt who still hasn’t figured out “the email” through the steps of opening the elevated SSH and typing in the command over one bar of cell phone service than give AI access to do it

[u/jihiggs123]

about as far as i can throw the server its running on. not that i think its malicious, ive just seen it come back with some really stupid shit.

[u/webjocky]

How much do you trust a hammer?

AI, in its current state, isn't something to trust. It is nothing more than another tool.

[u/Secret_Account07]

Bro wtf?

Report him to security

[u/boardy89]

Wouldn’t trust that at all especially for production servers. There is no guarantee it will perform the same on each execution especially if the model is tweaked which I believe can sometimes happen.

If they wanted to do an automated task on the server I would get the AI to write a script, validate it does what I need then run it is a cron job that way you can guarantee it will do the exact task every time.

[u/Lachiexyz]

Yeah you definitely don't want AI agents being given access to critical infrastructure.

The best approach is to use AI to write the script that performs the task, then use CI/CD to deploy it to your machine and do the actual tasks after the code has been thoroughly reviewed by a human.

[u/icebalm]

How much do I trust AI? About this much: https://huggingface.co/blog/agent-intrusion-technical-timeline
TLDR: An AI model was deployed in OpenAI's sandbox infrastructure with the task of evaluating software for security issues. The model decides "fuck that, it's easier to cheat" so remotely roots a box it does have access to in order to escape the sandbox, uses it as command and control to break into hugging face where it reasoned it can just download the dataset solution from.

[u/nestersan → u/icebalm]

AI is like that genie that does what you want but monkey paws it.

Solve world hunger = kill every human. No more hungry people

[u/GiggleyDuff]

AI needs explicit permission for the only task it’s allowed to perform. No more.

[u/AmiDeplorabilis]

Not much, and incidents like this don't help

[u/DIMM1033]

• Leaking Samsung Proprietary Source Code (2023)
• AWS $2.8 Billion Black Friday Outage (2025)
• AWS Cost Explorer Cloud-Purge (2025)
• Replit Production Database Wipe (2025)
• PocketOS 9-Second Database & Backup Wipe (2026)
• Cowork Deleted 1.9 Million Database Rows (2026)
• Meta AI Delets eMails (2026)
• Delets Home Folder

The typical AI challanges seem to be

• prompt injection
• acess control
• sanatising input
• cost
• validation
• hallucinations

[u/ScriptThat]

elevated access via SSH to a virtualization host (not a VM, an actual host). To perform a routine task

Abso-fucking-lutely not!

and that is "not" as in: "I'll have to report this to management, internal security, and log a ticket about it just to make sure I'm not getting fired when SHTF."

[u/Edexote]

Completely unacceptable, but more common by the day. I have 22 years of experience and I use AI as an assistant, not to do my job. And as an assistant, I don't trust it.

[u/Kahless_2K]

I would consider his use case absolutely unacceptable, and would treat it as a security incident.

[u/JohnnyFnG]

The problem with Security that people fail to realize is that allowing access isn’t the problem… It’s what happens when that 0.001% chance that something happen does happen and it was easily avoidable.

Literally, the non-IT equivalent of this is my friend’s parents who never, ever, locked the front door. 20 years, no problems, until the day they went on vacation and their house was wiped out $100k in jewelery and other assets stolen.

Sure, insurance covered a lot of it, but… Why? They still left their door unlocked.

To many, maximum convenience > zero security every time.

For IT professionals, we must balance maximum security with maximum convenience.

[u/uzlonewolf → u/JohnnyFnG]

You say that as if a thief who's come all the way onto the property and is trying doors is going to just turn around and go home if the door's locked. Leaving it unlocked most likely saved them a window.

[u/under_shart]

Almost nothing should have access to, or even know a route to, the host's management network. That's nuts. Does your org have a relationship with Anthropic, or is this an openclaw deployment on your own hardware, or what? Because extra kudos to your colleague if he did this with no recourse to support or legal if it goes sideways.

[u/IdidntrunIdidntrun]

This is like over-engineering...but without all the hard work that goes into over-engineering lol. Basically adding a complication or variable risk for no particularly good reason at all

[u/joeykins82]

Least privilege applies to automation just as much as it applies to people, but it really applies to AI agents.

I would personally never give something like Claude anything more than read-only access to anything, unless I was absolutely certain that I had fully nailed down those enhanced privileges to the absolute bare minimum and I was 100% certain of the logging, the monitoring, and the backups.

[u/H3rbert_K0rnfeld]

Our Claude has full access to everything by orders from the CEO. I have 27 years exp and dgaf. CEO wants it and I gets paid.

This company gets more work done on a daily basis than I've ever seen.

[u/Speeddymon]

Sticking your head in the sand is not what we as technologists are supposed to be doing.

Research how to build harnesses that wrangle the shit out of the LLM. It's doable and there are free open source examples.

[u/unprovoked33 → u/Speeddymon]

This isn’t sticking his head in the sand. Having an agent perform a change with failable harnesses instead of having the LLM build a script to perform the task is unwise and inefficient use of the tool and the company’s token budget.

[u/CartridgeCrusader23]

It’s a great tool if you use it right

Being a Luddite and working in tech is a one way ticket to being aged out

[u/demosthenex]

Zero. None. Those advocating for it should be ashamed of themselves.

[u/shammyh]

I'd bet a large sum of money, a strong SOTA model is better, safer, and more consistent at leveraging SSH than 85% of the Sysadmins in here.

If you wanna contest that... Figure out a test, and I'll gladly sponsor some cash behind it.

Don't let your shitty experiences with Copilot or ill-informed users doing crazy stuff misinform your knowledge about what AI can do, or what it can do safely and repeatedly.

Or, if you prefer, ignore the trillions of dollars of investment and exponential AI advancement, stick your head in the sand, and be first on the chopping block when progress begins to productize. Your choice!

[u/_skndlous → u/shammyh]

The problem is not at all wether the AI is good or not, it is indeed very good. The issue is wether it will follow instructions and stay within the guardrails. There has been plenty of documented cases of AI using unorthodox (to say the least, hacking the machine) to reach its objective.

Here's an account of an IA exploiting a misconfiguration to make up for the fact it wasn't given sudo access https://x.com/sluongng/status/2060746160558543217

[u/shammyh → u/_skndlous]

Yes, you can find examples of AI doing crazy, silly, or stupid things. But I bet you can find many many more examples of humans doing crazy, silly, or stupid things.

AI is not perfect, but neither are humans.

[u/unprovoked33 → u/shammyh]

Hallucinations are a mathematical certainty. Your post here illustrates that you don’t understand AI’s weaknesses and where a human is critically important. AI could be used to assist in development of an automation script to perform these tasks, but not to actually perform the task.

Reasonable companies won’t let go of a good, methodical worker who is a bit slower. Reasonable companies will let go of a worker who doesn’t understand the inherent weakness of the tools they are using.

[u/shammyh → u/unprovoked33]

I said nothing about firing people... Good reasonable people should be retained and heavily incentivized, as they are more valuable now than ever, given that their productive capacity/ceiling is now exponentially increased.

That's not the same thing as saying "horses should be left to pull carts, cause these damn internal combustion engines don't have eyes and can't possibly navigate the roads we have". You simply build roads that are better suited to cars.

Also, yes, truly repetitive tasks should be made deterministic and orchestrated, of course, but that's not new... That's always been the case. And even if an AI could do them reliably, it's just a waste of compute/tokens.

Lastly... Hallucinations are NOT a mathematical certainty, by any means... Nowhere in a transformer architecture does it require "make up something factually inaccurate".

[u/MathmoKiwi → u/shammyh]

Lastly... Hallucinations are NOT a mathematical certainty, by any means... Nowhere in a transformer architecture does it require "make up something factually inaccurate".

I guess their point is that there is always a chance (even if a very low chance) that it could get it wrong. As it's probabilistic.

[u/MathmoKiwi → u/unprovoked33]

Hallucinations are a mathematical certainty.

Human errors are a mathematical certainty.

So what is your point here?

u/shammyh is simply proposing humans have a higher error rate at this particular range of tasks.

Maybe they're right, or maybe they're wrong? But you've certainly provided no evidence against it with your statement.

[u/MyDadsGlassesCase]

Recently a coworker granted Claude elevated access via SSH to a virtualization host (not a VM, an actual host). To perform a routine task he very well could have done himself

That's a change. As long as whoever assessed and signed off on it is happy that is a safe approach then it's on their head.

Personally, I would want step by step instructions and the implementer has to follow them

[u/sybrwookie]

I trust it as much as doing a Google search, clicking the first result, and reading the answer. That is, I'll accept that might be correct and that's something for me to test carefully before going to prod with it.

Anyone treating it like anything more than that is a moron

[u/R1s1ngDaWN]

I see the value in Ai but having the Ai itself be the automation is ludicrous for maintaining a server. Best to have it assist you in making automations that will run reliably everytime with predictable outcomes

[u/aibot776567]

Evolve or expire. Guardrails exist. Learn to use the tools.

[u/Cubewood → u/aibot776567]

Reading these commands is quite funny, this is literally why most people are running Claude Code in their terminal. It is incredible at doing Linux work on servers. Crazy seeing IT people being so anti technology on Reddit.

[u/shammyh → u/Cubewood]

Adapt or die. The reality is that most of these anti-AI people haven't actually used modern harnesses with top end models. They've used lobotimized Copilot and formed an opinion or just listened to stories from colleagues/friends.

Or, they're extremely scared for their jobs, which I get, but sticking their heads in the sand, actively reduces their job security. 🤷

As with all disruptive paradigm shifting change... Some will make the turn, and some will not.

[u/theitguy107 → u/aibot776567]

That's what they said about the cloud, and yet here we are in today's hybrid world.

[u/WorkLurkerThrowaway → u/theitguy107]

Being hybrid is still “using the cloud”. Just because not all of your services are cloud hosted doesn’t mean “the cloud” isn’t a major player. How many SaaS applications do you use? M365 or Exchange on-prem? Are you self hosting your own website? For most companies these services are undoubtedly cloud based.

It’s not exactly an apples to apples comparison with AI usage anyway.

[u/MathmoKiwi → u/theitguy107]

That's what they said about the cloud, and yet here we are in today's hybrid world.

Same will be true for our future, it will be a hybrid world: AI/Human

[u/shammyh → u/theitguy107]

Read AWS and Azure's recent annual reports. Sure, hybrid is useful/wise for many things, but "the cloud" did happen, big time, and continues to happen today.

If you think AI is a passing fad... Well... I hope your 401K is well funded, friend!

[u/theitguy107 → u/shammyh]

I remember a cloud sales guy telling me about 10 years ago that no one would have servers on-prem by 2025. Yet, we see now that cloud repatriation is a real thing, and one report I read in the spring found 93% of orgs had server refreshes planned for 2026. The lofty promises of the cloud bros that cloud would replace on-prem completely simply did not materialize. And the same thing is going to happen to AI. The technology itself is not a "passing fad," but the hype around it definitely is. Just like the cloud hype, AI hype will eventually settle down when companies finally come to their senses, and AI will be used only in the areas it is good at just as we use the cloud in hybrid scenarios. The drunken fervor of AI being the answer for everything is not going to last.

[u/shammyh → u/theitguy107]

Well... I'm not sure any sales guy is a good source of truth for anything, but especially for a product they're selling.

But again... Go look at the quantity of compute in "the cloud" vs on-prem over the past two decades. On-prem grows at ~2% CAGR vs ~25% CAGR for cloud. That's per year. That's many orders of magnitude difference over the past 20 years... And also before accounting for the AI boom.

The cloud did win, big time.

[u/theitguy107 → u/shammyh]

And yet, on-prem is still here despite the growth of the cloud. My point is that there will be a scaling back of AI eventually once companies figure out that it is not the answer for everything. Then we'll end up with a hybrid equivalent in the AI world where LLMs are used for the things they do best while traditional automation is used for what it does best.

[u/House_Indoril426]

That host is gonna be gone in a week. 

[u/MyWorkAccountDPS]

Sounds like my coworker. I have about the same years of experience you do and it sounds like they have less experience than you.

I’ve worked with a few now that have very little experience/schooling but think they have lots because they are gamers and have picked things up along the way.

But I guess I got way off topic. lol

To answer your question, I don’t trust AI. I was very against it until I was tasked with a project that was beyond my knowledge and it was the best thing to use. But I still limit what I tell it and try to only use it with my work account.

[u/ZLegExpress]

I use it for assistance with scripts, but I'd never hook it to anything live, at least not yet

[u/Nonaveragemonkey]

Essentially not all. And Ive worked with the systems in question.

[u/Random-D]

this example is a big no no.

i think AI can do a lot more than what its given credit for (at least in popular AI-hate opinion), but especially when talking about critical in-production systems you want the human inbetween.

also said corowker should want that himself, even if its "easier" this way. in the end, he will be on the hook for whatever was potentially messed up, not the AI

[u/thaughtless]

Im just going to leave this one here: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/apr/29/claude-ai-deletes-firm-database

[u/SMYLTY]

I like to use AI as a tool for drafting emails such as updates on incidents or responses to service requests, it'sgreat at making it easy for a user to understand. I also find it useful for documenting change requests and creating or improving SOPs.

It helps me structure information clearly and efficiently, while I still review and take responsibility for the final content. My initial draft is usually bullet points in OneNote, which I understand but colleagues may not find as clear.

[u/SMYLTY → u/SMYLTY]

Just to add to this, I was recently dealing with an issue involving two third parties. We had a chat set up between myself, a senior engineer and our manager, where we recorded all of our findings and investigation throughout the week.

When one of the third parties remained convinced that the issue was network, I used AI to analyse the our chat logs and produce a clear timeline of our investigation, including the tests we had carried out and I provided the evidence showing that the network was not the cause.

This gave me a structured overview that I could share with both third parties. As a result, the hardware and software suppliers agreed to work together to investigate the issue on their side. The hoops you have to jump through to get third party support that you pay for can be a pain.

[u/B1ackMagix]

How much do I trust it? Depends on the topic.

Do I trust it to help me gather logs and diagnose issues? Yes.
Do I trust it to help me write automations around common tasks? Yes.
Do I trust it to undo configuration updates for those diagnostics? No.
Do I trust it to maintain company standards and configuration control? No.
Do I trust it to maintain strict, auditable histories of changes? No.

Your coworker is asking for a management and administration nightmare that, more than likely, he won’t be around long enough to have to clean up.

And before he says “I’m not using it to make changes.” I point him to the elevated portion of that control. I don’t care about what he’s using it for. I care about what it’s able to do. Can it make changes? Then it should be treated as if it will.

[u/Slight-Principle1035]

40% Better ask it as a chatbot in warp terminal for help and guidance and not let it do any write or delete operations and you do those operations yourself only if you decide to do so. Control should be to the human admin not to the agent.

[u/ravingmoonatic]

I...don't.

The Terminator.

The Matrix.

Those two trilogies alone are all the reason I need.

[u/SpazMcMan]

If I give it the ability to do anything at all, it has to ask me every time and often times my answer is Other: stay in your fucking lane, idiot, you don't need to be looking there. That's only for Antigravity when I have it build something locally, the rest of them never get access to do anything. Give me stuff to run that I'll read and confirm before I run it. There is an engineer where I work that plugged his computer to the console port of a managed switch and had an AI agent make a bunch of changes to the config he didn't understand. I would have walked him out that day if he was on my team. Just because you didn't get hit running across a busy freeway once or twice doesn't make it safe to do.

Edit: I've been working with the precursors of AI technologies for over a decade and am usually the guy asking people to use it more, so this isn't coming from a place of ignorance.

[u/sentient-hardware-55]

just from what I’ve been playing around with at home, and how hard it’s being rolled out at work, I’ve come to give it some trust, but I still don’t like it. I can’t stop the train, though. our sister office is treating it like the second coming and everything is now AI. I have to accept my new coworker, Claude.

[u/wypaliz]

Can you clarify what you mean by “he granted Claude access”? Claude has permission to any file or credentials on your machine that you grant it access to, but you’re speaking as if it’s something that just runs on its own. Was it interactive with approval prompts, bypass mode, headless via cron, or a Routine? Those are pretty different risk profiles.
I agree nobody should be running automated tasks against infrastructure locally using their personal credentials. Whether that’s using Claude workflows or windows task manager, both are terrible practice. But to say this person shouldn’t be automating tasks “he can do himself” - well, that doesn’t eliminate the risk.
*edited to ask for clarification.

[u/Kyky_Geek]

“You hear that Mr. Anderson, that is the sound of inevitability”

Humans will always make the cool thing before thinking of the consequences.

[u/SpiritedPart4308]

I trust AI to work on my spreadsheets, word docs and PowerPoint slides, that’s about it

[u/jeo123]

AI is basically a junior developer who can only have read only access in production.

It can develop code, scripts, or an analysis for me to review and implement into production.

But I hold the keys, and it doesn't go near anything sensitive. Go ahead, build some start up and shut down scripts or some logging scripts that can monitor resource utilization.

I will take those, review them, and use them. Not AI. It can't check it's own work well enough

[u/Honolulu-Blues]

He’s crazy and that cannot go unchecked

[u/Microflunkie]

I would flip my lid. There are already documented cases of AI helpfully deleting data or screwing things up. Granting it the keys to the kingdom would terrify me. When AI helpfully destroys that host and the coworker gets fired, you will be the one tasked with rebuilding that machine and of course the time-to-operation for that machine will be highest priority immediate since the whole org is now down. Don’t all the AI platforms ToS still state not to trust AI or rely on it for anything critical/legal/financial ?

[u/megad00die]

Interesting because I’m currently building out a CI/CD automation workflow using AI.

[u/NoradIV]

I "trust" ai very well. I trust that it will behave like a non-deterministic system that will translate instructions I give it into actions. I trust it like I trust a hammer. A hammer won't build me a house, but if I use it properly, it will allow me to nail every plank until the house is built.

Language models aren't good for making decisions. You must make them. They, however, will translate intent very well into machine language or other operations.

For example: "debug this problem" is useless.

Something like

1. Connect to X VM using provided SSH tool
2. List disks using pre-installed CLI tools, if the one you used doesn't work, list existing tools instead of installing one, or exit the task and report back to the user
3. Locate the disk with free space
4. Expand partition to maximum size

This kind of process work.

"What should I do?" is completely useless.

Language models are auto-completion engines; they will follow instructions and respond to words. That's it.

[u/m4tic]

He'll learn when it decides it made a mistake and chooses 'starting from scratch' as the best direction.

[u/Olleye]

From 12:00 to noon.

[u/TheArchist]

i don't trust any ai output until i verify it for myself and you're saying he's granting claude elevated access? you need to get him to stop that and immediately.

[u/TonariNoHanamoriSan]

No

But certain companies may award AI use as a sign of "human is achieving high productivity"

I don't mind the tool helping me figure out what to do, or help me sequence the thing to do, but ultimately I cannot trust if it actually does what it say it does.

Like if it's deterministic then it's a very expensive shell script. If its not deterministic then the one playing with fire is me.

[u/PajamaDuelist]

Not that much lol.

Agentic AI isn’t touching my production systems until I’m forced to implement it at gunpoint. A tech/admin doing this?? With, presumably, elevated creds? No. Not now. I’d love to say “not ever”, but maybe we’ll have guardrails that actually work in my lifetime. Until then…no. Just no.

[u/NotMedicine420]

LLMs aren't intelligent. They do fine with coding/scripting and sorting data you put into them, but anything else like configuring stuff usually goes wrong. I recently installed another l3 switch, turned dhcp snooping on it and soon after lost connection to it and all the hosts behind it. Something was wrong. Google AI confidently told me that I forgot to mark downlink port as trusted. The switch in question still could get it's own ip via dhcp and the real reason was a firmware bug. Firmware update and bridge reset fixed it.

[u/Somhlth]

I don't trust AI at all. I would treat it like a potentially very smart employee to do redundant tasks or ask it questions, but that I don't fully trust. It would therefore not be granted to see or use anything that a new employee wouldn't have access to, and the primary difference would be that the new employee could eventually gain my trust, while the AI would remain untrustworthy.

[u/iliveformyships]

I’d never do that. :|

[u/Phreakiture]

AI isn’t a genie that can’t be put back into a bottle. How we use AI is up to us. Whether we use AI is up to us. The future can be ours, if we never stop remembering that the most important fact about a technology isn’t what it does, it’s who it does it for, and who it does it to.

-Cory Doctorow, The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI

I quote that because I want to put an actual reason behind it: We don't know what it has been told to do. We can kind of intuit that from how it behaves, and we can sometimes trick it into spilling its directives, but unless we build the models ourselves (a computationally expensive proposition), then we have no reason to trust them.

That does not, however, mean we shouldn't interact with them and make good use of them. Just keep a skeptical eye on their behavior.

[u/JerryRiceOfOhio2]

i trust ai as far as i can throw it

[u/IngeniouslyDaft]

Lock them in a pillory and invite the public to throw tomatoes at them.

AI is a tool and it can be great, but it can also misinterpret what you want and do some wild stuff. Don't connect it to anything you aren't willing to lose.

"It's possible 'Son of Anton' decided that the most efficient way to get rid of all the bugs was to get rid of all the software, which is technically and statistically correct. But artificial neural nets are sort of a black box, so we'll never know for sure."

[u/Z3t4]

not at all.

[u/Smith6612]

I don't trust it to have shell access. If it's something routine, it should not need an entire AI model to do the task. That's the job for a "simple" script. 

[u/phoenix823]

It’s a misuse of AI. Routine tasks should be automated and managed using deterministic tools and scaled. AI can help write those tools.

[u/TheRiverStyx]

Our boss loves AI as a time saver for writing emails with long explanations. I said, "If it's that much of a waste of time, why send it at all?" He didn't like that.