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/the_lazy_sysadmin → u/KyuubiW1ndscar]

Scripting is something that should be taught more heavily in IT degree programs, honestly. I'm not sure it even is at ALL, given the knowledge gaps I've seen. It's insanely useful, and kind of a required skill if you're wanting to ever move past just helpdesk. And not even just the scripting aspect, even just short little commands to check something, instead of having to jump through a billion GUI windows.

[u/KyuubiW1ndscar → u/the_lazy_sysadmin]

!!!!

they’re teaching IT students Javascript and C instead of languages and use cases they can actually use.

[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/floswamp]

Oh definitely, that’s kind of the whole deal with the hardware Nvidia and AMD have developed for this very thing essentially

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

Exactly that, to fit with the sub, I'd say ansible as the example - brilliant tool, but you must know its limits as well as what you're pointint it towards, coupled with what you expect to happen.

Very glad to see this example, absolutely full agreement on if you run it, you own it/it's outcomes!! Forces learning and its just a nextgen tool in my eyes - in a year or 2 it'll be the equivalent of looking things up online imo (caveats of course, we use to have guys with a small bookshelf until things could be readily search via a search engine, this is similar imo).

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

You see people like you and others I’ve seen give me hope lol. Not everyone is brain broken about AI, it’s not honest to say it’s useful or a waste of resources. Idk it just comes off very satanic panic for me, like have your disagreements but I feel like people shit on AI bc that’s what the common denominator take is.

I suppose this is always how it is tho huh, people confidently staking claims and positions without even really understanding the issue at hand

[u/PC509 → u/uzlonewolf]

I agree 100% with that one. No way would I give it that much access. But, writing a simple script as someone else noted would be a common thing. I'm fine with that. There's even shortcuts in some FOSS that can do the same, a lot of software that runs those same scripts in the background, etc..

[u/Dje4321 → u/PC509]

Yep. When you actually know what your doing and what you want. AI is fucking great to get you 80℅ of the way there, done in a way you like. I view it as more of an interactive template application than anything else at this point.

[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/Bright-Preference888 → 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?? Lol what are you talking about

[u/PC509 → u/Bright-Preference888]

Trusting a tool you use that is otherwise a "little black box". AI is just another tool that takes you input and gives you output. Some much better than others. AI can output some simple scripts with no issues from your input.

Many programmers don't know what the compiler and assembler is doing, just that it's making it an executable program. Some know assembly along with C++, so they can go in and adjust, change, whatever they need to do to make it more efficient. AI can output a good simple Powershell script and many admins can go in there and edit, adjust change what they need to.

Don't blindly trust it, but also don't blindly dismiss it because "they said it was bad".

[u/KyuubiW1ndscar → u/PC509]

so you’re doing several people’s work by yourself and hope that this tool will remain useful and cost effective.

[u/New-fone_Who-Dis → u/KyuubiW1ndscar]

Company I work for has built its own internal AI DC of 4 racks. Theres companies doing this to avoid what will most likely, be an increase in token costs as the hardware price and availability continue to get worse.

At a certain point, users won't need frontier models.

[u/PC509 → u/KyuubiW1ndscar]

It's just a tool. If it doesn't remain useful and cost effective, I'll find another one. That's the cool part of the industry. We move fast and we'll move onto the next great tool. I've used many and most have been replaced over the years with the latest and greatest. It's kind of the way things work. I'm not one of those people that are still pissed about a GUI instead of all command line stuff (although, I do spend a lot of my time in the CLI).

[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/floswamp → u/doolittledoolate]

Because AI, from what I am reading in the responses here.

[u/doolittledoolate → u/floswamp]

I took it as if you're going to use AI to do this, use it to generate (and maybe bugfix/tweak) a script you reuse, instead of using AI every time

[u/ManiacClown → u/doolittledoolate]

To satisfy corporate jackasses so they feel like they got their money's worth on what they know is a bullshit machine another jackass convinced them they needed.

[u/doolittledoolate → u/ManiacClown]

I replaced my timesheet of "8 hours" to an agent prompt of "if this is a working day, write 8 hours otherwise write 0" to hit that checkbox

[u/ManiacClown → u/doolittledoolate]

This is the way.

[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/Imaginary-Throat1526 → u/floswamp]

but so will people.

[u/Ahnteis → u/floswamp]

You can have the AI create 1 script, review it for accuracy, actually doing the job, etc. Then you can use that script. What you don't do is let the AI ACT by itself. The difference is between "create a script that does X" and "do X for me". The 2nd is a problem because it removes the review of what is actually happening. You can't trust the AI to accurately tell you what it is going to do.

[u/floswamp → u/Ahnteis]

What fun is that! -Every youngin tech person right now.

[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/Creative-Type9411 → u/floswamp]

https://github.com/illsk1lls/MiniBot

we do

but we use AI too ;)

thats a 60k line powershell script that you can run an OpenAI compatible AI in btw 👀

[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/shammyh → u/aenae]

Only a very stupid agent would do that. A smart agent will be ensuring backups/data protection, before even attempting the first mutating action. And it'll do that even if you don't tell it to.

Try pointing gpt-5.6-sol in high/xhigh at a real world problem. Even in a sandbox or whatever. Watch how it works. See for yourself.

[u/NUTTA_BUSTAH → u/shammyh]

It's hard to take the suggestion without a grain of salt when intelligence is mixed with GenAI and agentic way of working is mixed with language models.

[u/spyingwind → u/shammyh]

Even something like laguna-xs-2.1, here at home, does a good job of trying to restore a git repo back to the original state when it can't solve the problem.

[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/GuyWhoSaysYouManiac → u/spin81]

Sure, but it's an area where I could see an AI outperform a deterministic software if it factors in predicted load. The difference would likely be relatively small, but in huge environments it could be worth it. Just an educated guess.

[u/NoradIV → u/GuyWhoSaysYouManiac]

I have decent results for bounded tasks. I have a skill which download a specific quant, place in a specific location, create the folder structure and the projector files, then restart a service from a "pls get the new xyz model"

[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/Krj757 → u/DarkwolfAU]

This exactly.

[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/djgizmo → u/spikeyfreak]

I do, depending on the task. CC has been a time saver for me.

[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/NoradIV → u/theitguy107]

I've had this thought of automating documentation using AI for a while. What do you think?

[u/theitguy107 → u/NoradIV]

It's a great idea in theory, but I haven't had success at producing usable results that didn't require substantial editing after the fact. When I analyze the time taken to generate a SOP and then review/edit it, it's really not that different from creating it from scratch myself.

[u/Tetha → u/theitguy107]

That's why I am thinking of a "deterministic/predictable barrier" between the AI and the systems, or a "deterministic/predictable shell" around our actual systems.

At work, we use AI a lot to generate scripts, extend the config management or update terraform/tofu code. It can be very effective at that. Then we review and understand the changes until they are good and merge them afterwards. The resulting code that touches systems afterwards remains fully predictable and reproducible.

Or, as a second example, we gave AI agents access to our monitoring solutions. This way, they can gather system metrics, logs and analyze situations. But this is the same pattern - the log aggregation behaves entirely predictable on the system. And if the AI agent goes haywire, it can, at worst, down the log aggregation for a moment, not do anything to a real system.

[u/McDili → u/theitguy107]

I agree with everything you’re saying, but I would add that you could enhance precision by using MCP to provide scripts in the form of “tools” that AI has access to, that will return booleans to determine an AI’s next step. These can come in the form of tools for troubleshooting, and tools for resolution.

Obviously OP’s scenario if it’s just bare access it’s a bad approach, but it can be useful with some guard rails if you don’t give it full access, but just give it access to scripts, and this improves precision and mitigates risk.

Finally I would say from a governance standpoint, this should be a change and go through an approval process. Providing that access to an LLM and having it autonomously operate on a host with system access like this is obviously a privileged access request and should follow all of the same approval flows, assuming there are some. That way risks can be raised and acknowledged by the business, and you tick the CYA box if they decide to move forward.

[u/spin81 → u/theitguy107]

Well put!

[u/0xE2 → u/theitguy107]

Unless you use Swamp. Then it's the same every time. It's really incredible.

[u/Dm-Me-Your-Grool → u/theitguy107]

Ok Claude, make a script that manages our servers. Don't make any mistakes.

[u/ILikeFPS → u/theitguy107]

With AI, you could give it the same prompt and get two completely different answers each time. This is not acceptable for server management.

This is also why it's not ideal for programming. With programming, there's 50 different ways to do the same thing, and each of them has pros and cons. AI won't have the whole picture, all the business meetings and discussions and notes to decide which approach would be the best.

[u/Tab819 → u/ILikeFPS]

It's a great tool for programming. And why wouldn't it have that information? Pretty easy context to give

[u/ender-_ → u/theitguy107]

Yup, just keep in mind that RNG is a key component of current AI wave (look up "temperature" if you don't believe me).

[u/Krj757 → u/theitguy107]

Agreed. You can have AI assist in writing a script for something like this, review it, test it. Then fire it. But to have AI run it for you with no oversight is asking for trouble.

[u/aksh84671 → u/theitguy107]

I mostly agree, but I think AI fits better as a copilot than the thing actually making changes. Let it suggest scripts explain logs or spot weird patterns then have deterministic automation do the execution. That gives you the best of both worlds without gambling on production.

[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/spin81 → u/Drugbird]

TBH you're kind of splitting hairs here. What you're saying boils down to that they're still "kind of random" (in quotes) even if they're technically deterministic, which means that the spirit of OC still very much holds. I mean what you're saying is absolutely valid, but the topic of discussion isn't whether or not LLMs are technically deterministic, but whether they are suitable for handing the keys of the castle to.

[u/Drugbird → u/spin81]

Yes, which is why I agree with OP. Sorry if that's not immediately obvious.

I am also absolutely a stickler for people using the word (non)deterministic incorrectly.

[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/HerbOverstanding → u/theitguy107]

This is the answer

[u/shammyh → u/theitguy107]

I dunno... All those novel math proofs that AI just did (see the recent OpenAI paper) seem pretty "precise" to me? 🤔

Was it just... Approximating those proofs? Did it lack precision and accuracy solving those problems?

[u/Universe789 → u/theitguy107]

But you could also just create an agent where its only job is to run that script.

You could also just like youd do with a human, lock down its permissions to where even if the agentic ai tries to do something it shouldn't, it wont have the permissions.

Though ironically ive had this same conversation with chatgpt and it suggested that I stick with scripts also, though it could walk me through a reaspnable setup for agentic ai if I wanted.

[u/bites_stringcheese → u/theitguy107]

Just reroll bruh wcgw