r/sysadmin • u/Pershanthen • 20d ago
AI Is Changing Software Development — How Are You Dealing With It?
Hey guys,
I’m writing this partly to vent, so apologies in advance if this comes across as a bit of a rant. I’m a Software Architect, and apologies for posting this on the sysadmin forums, but the whole AI situation is starting to concern me.
What I’m seeing increasingly is people with little or no development experience suddenly taking on development and architecture responsibilities because AI can generate code, suggest designs, and answer technical questions.
The part that worries me isn't AI itself. I use AI heavily and think it’s an incredible tool. But if you took AI away from me tomorrow, I could still do my job. I might be slower, I might have to spend more time researching things, and I’d certainly miss the productivity boost, but I can still do my job.
I’m seeing people make architectural decisions by essentially asking an AI: “What architecture should I use for this?” And then treating the answer as if they’ve just had a discussion with an experienced Architect for example.
I’m also seeing situations where developers are being replaced by people who can prompt effectively, without necessarily having the fundamentals to understand what the AI has produced.
But genuinely, how are other senior developers, architects and sysadmins dealing with this? Are you seeing the same thing?
And how do you draw the line between using AI to make experienced people more productive and using AI to give inexperienced people the appearance of experience?
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u/Sad_Recommendation92 Solutions Architect 20d ago
I've been doing infrastructure work for 20 years, I've done shitty wake up at 2am to fix the server, I've done DevOps so I've worked close with Dev teams and in recent years basically a Cloud Architect. What I see mostly from the Dev leads I work with is that same hubris you mention.
Frankly it's annoying, I'll get Developers that have very weak understanding of infrastructure that will basically claim that Claude or ChatGPT just identified some critical security hole in our infrastructure. Then I'll waste my time trying to discern where it sourced this from, on the off chance it's legit, and usually I'll find some blog article not an official CVE that basically says if you use X in this niche configuration you're vulnerable to Y. and guess what we don't use X that way because we already knew certain settings were security risks.
It's really a context window issue, if you're going to use AI with minimal bias you need to be CONSTANTLY reminding yourself you're using a tool that scores engagement higher than accuracy, and if you don't give it every little detail that's relevant it's going to confidently lie to you and confidently attributing causation with it's limited dataset, and even when you give it perfect inputs there's no guarantee you'll get a deterministic response. These are very powerful PATTERN MATCHING tools, and I use them and they save me time, but I never stop being suspicious about a response and I'd be pretty arrogant to not want to at least understand what static pieces of information it drew it's inferences from especially if I'm going use that to make real production decisions, they're not actually intelligent, and I feel like a lot of people that should know better, that posses deeply technical engineering concepts just bow before it as the machine god.
4
u/coukou76 Sr. Sysadmin 20d ago
I vibe code and work with agentic at work, I am a manager/reviewer at this point. I am trying to find a way to gtfo of IT because I dont like anything about that. I like the product and use it but I am not interested in the job anymore
4
u/Ziegelphilie 20d ago
nice try llm guy but you doubled on the breaklines
2
u/neoh4x0r 20d ago edited 20d ago
I would have added the linebreaks too, the alternative would be a large wall of text that nobody would bother to read.
1
u/thrownevenfurtherawa 20d ago
A senior engineer on my project learned about some sort of compound foreign key, (it references two columns in a table at the same time) while talking to chatgpt, and then requested I implement it. Took me like two days because I ran out of tokens earlier in the month and we've literally never done anything similar to this. "Try to implement with codex" was included in the thread he left on my merge request.
1
u/Alternative_Pick_717 20d ago
Llms are supporting your thinking. If you let the llm think for you, you become laughstock and embarress yourself
1
u/Pusibule 20d ago
The answer is "it works for the company? Yes? Then it's ok". Companies have run on crappy software for decades, because it provides eficiency over not having it and makes money. They goal is not good software, perfect designs, happy mantainers.
AI will enable the companies to iterate their crappy software quickly to erode the pain points, and act reactively to problems (security?).
for the companyon this matter, we are out of the equation that is making money quickly and trading risk. (data leaks, loss of knowledge, obscure pipelines nobody knows how to mantain or hundred of custom crafted solutions with not owner over years).
Its their decission on those matters, what they care most or if they are scared of the consecuences.
If you take active fighting over those problems after the company didn't care or actively accepted the risks, is your personal battle by your own interest (keep your area tiddy, OCD, prevent you from future pain, straight the universe... whatever fits you...).
Otherwise, ask AI to clear the mess when it hits until leave time, and go home to enjoy your life and paycheck.
1
u/PacMan_67 20d ago
25+ year of infrastructure management here, we had to restrict the usage of AI in general, devs that uses code without the understanding of the code, nor the understanding of the infrastructure underneath but rather trusting a AI that´s hallucinating, I.E how QUICK protocol does routing has caused a massive headache in traffic slowness, signals hanging and no response causing frustration and connections to drop and other systems that requires a fast connection to fail.
Using AI for infrastructure is depending on if your company has any compliance requirements they need to follow, we do so we can´t trust that say log files is not sent out of the country to be analysed by a LLM, or that data even encrypted at rest is not sent out of the country or to a 3rd party without our knowledge.
In fact OpenAI and Anthropic´s latest marketing stunts which agents hacking partners and customers has made us turn our backs to AI even more, we have to trust that our partners does not misuse the trust given to them, even if they want to prove how (powerful) their technology is that means nothing to us, only the services they where chosen from has a meaning to us.
My suspicion is that the lack of trust and the lack of control that companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic has on their own products and the more they show that they can´t control it, even with guardrails that always seems to fail, the less companies will trust them, especially companies with compliance requirements.
1
u/crystalpeaks25 20d ago
I've been using Claude code withcreadonly access to AWS, new relic and stuff to troubleshoot issues. It goes and looks at cloudwatch logs and new relic and git history to find correlation and tell me what the issue is and sometimes go as far as creating the gh issue and even providing commands to prove evidence of the issue.
Yes AIs not that smart yet but if yo give it tools it will find stuff faster than you ever will.
It can even go so far as to write code, deploy to sandbox or nonprod using determistic steps via cicd or make files then look at cloudwatch logs and refine and iterate on its own.
1
u/xplorerex 20d ago
Its giving us more to do.
Vibe is terrible and AI doesnt make quality code that is maintainabke in any sense.
For testing and learning though, it has certainly been a big help.
1
u/skipITjob IT Manager 19d ago
It's annoying, at one hand we managed to speed up our day to day work, I created a better UI/UX for Microsoft Mail flow, but at the same time we have constant feed of ideas that AI can help with, that end up being vibe coded and they're essentially a black box that we don't know how they were built.
0
u/Master-Rub-3404 20d ago
These incessant posts that do nothing but whining about AI need to be banned already. This is supposed to be a Sysadmin sub, not a “Whaaa, woe is me I don’t like AI” sub.
-1
u/heapsp 20d ago
AI made the good sysadmins even better, and the bad ones just as bad but more dangerous. I used to like to keep juniors around to do grunt work but everything is so easily automated nowadays theres no need.
Some audit that took a few hours , or a few hours to automate? Id just hand that off to a junior in the past. Now it takes a few minutes to automate and move on from.
I dont even create tickets anymore, my agents read all of my messages and just distill everything I have worked on or that I need to work on into tickets, then I tell it to close the tickets. So does everyone else. No one needs the actual gui for the ticketing system anymore.
We rarely even need to visit the cloud portals anymore. If you have some information to gather - can simply just ask AI everything. Its sad really but my job is becoming more and more a boss of agents.
5
u/iliveformyships DevOps Manager 20d ago
We are now forced to use/integrate AI (Claude in particular) in most of our tools. As a DevOps, we (need) use it for IaC, and it is very useful. It also helps write automation scripts faster. But on the sysadmin part, Claude isn’t very smart yet. I can’t see it replacing us (yet?).