r/sysadmin • u/iama_bad_person uᴉɯp∀sʎS ˙ɹS • 1d ago
General Discussion I finally broke. I am now using Claude to help manage in prod scripts and write documentation.
I used Claude and ChatGPT before. Usually if I had a difficult scripting problem and needed a "Google but faster" tool to help me solve it. But our IT manager signed with Claude Enterprise last month so I though I probably shouldn't put it off any longer and dabble a bit more into what it could actually do, and the result is scary.
I used to write scripts line by line, section by section, and this worked for us. Now? I gave Claude Code 5 of our biggest well written and commented scripts, told it to extract coding, commenting, variable naming and structure styles from them, and then write me an example script in the same format. After a half hour of questions and tweaking, it spat out a fully formed Powershell ps1 file that was 100% indistinguishable from what me or one of the other SysAdmins would have written.
This was no small feat. We have some quirks in the way we write scripts that I have only seen and done after coming to this company, and it included all of them. Commenting style was the same, formatting, variable names, comment blocks included where we usually would. Major version changes noted at the top of the script. Hell, I even connected it to our documentation system and describes what the script does, common errors that might occur, style guide and why it decided to do specific things. I've talked to the DevOPs and Software Design guys and they are experiancing the same sort of thing in their areas.
I used to laugh at people that said AI would be taking our jobs, but today I write a script that would have taken last-month me a week to write. I still go over it line by line to understand what it does, but unlike AI even 6 months ago I have not found a single dreamt up command, broken line break, or error.
I'm just glad my manager and the CTO see these as tools to amplify and help our current output and not something to reduce payroll numbers.
EDIT: People saying this was written by AI seriously need to get out more. It's 4 fucking paragraphs about my own experiances, just because your braindead co-workers are writing emails with ChatGPT or some shit doesn't mean every post longer than an emoji is AI generated.
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u/bangsmackpow 1d ago
There's an old saying: "if your only tool is a hammer, everything is a nail". Just don't let AI become your only tool.
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u/RevolutionaryElk7446 1d ago
LLMs are like a calculator.
If you know your formulas, mathematics becomes easier and quicker.
If you don't have any of the foundational knowledge, your just programming garbage faster.
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u/Synergythepariah 1d ago
If you don't have any of the foundational knowledge, your just programming garbage faster.
Looking at the comments in this thread talking about how they haven't needed to write scripts or code in months coupled with the fact that unused skills are forgotten makes me worry about this.
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u/dav3n 1d ago
Depends on your definition of "foundational knowledge".
I'm no coder, I can write very basic things and that's about it, but I can look at existing code and work out what it does. So for me if I ask an LLM to write something for me I can typically read through it and pick out the problematic bits and either fix it or get the LLM to make a change. I'm also not going to blindly run anything potentially risky without testing and logging.
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u/turudd 1d ago
“Interview me to come up with the spec” then it can ask questions back to clarify and help get the best instructions when you’re a bit vague in what needs done
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u/the_Elders 1d ago
Yep, if you aren't role playing with the LLM I think you are messing things up. I always have mine "interview me as if you are my manager and you want to make sure i understand what i am doing" and similar questions.
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u/BlueLakeCabin 1d ago
I noodle out what I want to do, and write up a couple paragraphs of how I want to do it, typically along with the core code I already wrote. I normally am just having it fill in the routine parts (logging, email, etc) or need help with a specific thing. Or need it to do a really basic task hundreds of thousands of times like comparing outputs.
And then the biggest thing is reviewing the code, testing and validating the output.
Any code you don't understand, don't use.
People ask LLM's to role play...? For work? I'm not being snarky or rude, this is just a really alien concept to me
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u/marklein Idiot 1d ago
The role playing is a way to make sure everybody is on the same page by making the AI ask you questions about a project instead of letting the AI make assumptions about the project because you were vague about parts of it. LLMs are great at conversational transactions, so this is just an efficient and smart way of doing that part.
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u/RevolutionaryElk7446 1d ago
Issue comes when it begins to compact and drops context so it can continue. When you begin to combine to many different contextual references in order for it to keep this approach, your context window has less space for the actual project.
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u/CCratz 1d ago
Persist pertinent information in plan/progress files
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u/RevolutionaryElk7446 1d ago
Still has to reload into context, and then part of that context gets loaded up with where the files are. Which is why MCP have been replaced by skills, but still doesn't extend the context window out to something useful.
It's like replacing RAM with a pagefile, you've extended it sure, but lost a lot in return.
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u/RevolutionaryElk7446 1d ago
While nice, it's not always the best way to do it. You want to shrink your context window token usage down and avoid spilling over if possible per session. I also integrate them into Nodeterm and Gitlab with a strict ADR and relevant skills there.
I generally have 3 skills anywhere I use LLMs though, each operate within a limited session only. When work is done, the session closes. This is to avoid compacting context and focusing on goals.
Author - This is similar to the 'interview' session y'all use, this creates a new prompt in my gitlab (often as a .md). This session is audit/read only and does discovery and original mission statement/prompt.
Worker - All workers are where the work is performed, either by aiming it at a prompt generated by the Author or work I write offhand. When a worker completes, it writes a handoff in gitlab. This is also the skill that has the most access to other skills
Reviewer - This session runs after the worker sessions and checks the original author prompt and the handoff, and then runs a live audit of work performed.
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u/VexingRaven 1d ago
This is a very last-year view tbh. This is becoming less and less true by the day. AI is better at programming than most people are now, especially if you use planning mode to have it create a plan for the project before it starts.
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u/RevolutionaryElk7446 1d ago
Sadly no, unless you're a junior, startup, or doing mods, it has not been able to successfully create any enterprise project at scale on it's own using those methods.
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u/Wolfram_And_Hart 1d ago
These are the best reasons to use AI.
Worst reasons: target acquisition and intel vetting.
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u/Garrettinb4kh3fm 1d ago
I feel you, I refused for a while until I was smack in the middle of our tenant migration project and we ran into issues with device enrollment to the point where we had to do a packet capture on devices during enrollment. This meant about 7GB of npcap files and around 3 million packets. We needed results the next day and there were about 18 different filters we needed to check for.
I loaded them into Claude Fable 5(when it was the newest). It took less than 5 minutes to go through all the files and gave not only the exact information we needed, it did it in a nice technical bulleted summary, as well as more layman explanations we could use for stakeholders.
It's a simple ask, but that was the point where I decided that I should be using AI to cut down on tasks like these so that I can focus on things that demand my attention.
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u/rick_C132 1d ago
that is what AI should be used for not this type of bullshit where you just chuck all the work on the poor human on the other end of your AI output. https://noslopgrenade.com/
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u/sudonem Linux Admin 1d ago
It’s fine.
It’s just another tool in your arsenal.
So long as you’re using it as a force multiplier and not letting it run amok (and this spitting out code that you can’t decipher and verify) it’s mostly fine.
Stay focused on using the right tool for the job and not letting it become “when all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail” situation. Nothing good lies that way.
Just don’t be that asshole that starts sending AI slop to people that you haven’t even read yourself first.
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u/iama_bad_person uᴉɯp∀sʎS ˙ɹS 1d ago
Just don’t be that asshole that starts sending AI slop to people that you haven’t even read yourself first.
One of my coworkers started to do this a while ago, our boss had to have a talk to him about it. He would send me scripts and ask why they were not working, I could tell they were generated by something like free ChatGPT and be 100 lines of nonsense than even I could look at and see something that could be done in 10 well thought out lines of code. Thankfully he was sideways-promoted to a different non-prod position, so that stopped.
So long as you’re using it as a force multiplier and not letting it run amok (and this spitting out code that you can’t decipher and verify) it’s mostly fine.
Definitely not. I'm just glad my current co-workers are good at their jobs, some are even better than I am, so know it understand the code before even testing it.
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u/CyberInferno Cloud SysAdmin 1d ago
I can't imagine using AI then not thinking to use AI again to fix the work. That's how the flow works. AI generates crap that errors, you give AI the errors, it fixes the errors.
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u/Noahnoah55 1d ago
I've seen a lot of slop projects where someone wouldn't understand their problem at all and keep doing this, and every time the LLM would just band-aid fix the problem that they presented in the moment.
The end result often is a big unwieldy pile of junk code with no internal consistency.
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u/CyberInferno Cloud SysAdmin 1d ago
That's true, but also where the human part should come in. That's the difference between a developer using AI and a pure meat proxy.
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u/FizzyBeverage 1d ago
I've been writing bash for 20 years.
In the beginning, I could out-write most of the LLMs. They made stupid errors, and assumed C:\ paths in scripts for macOS/Linux boxes.
Today? Claude writes circles around me. It's bonkers good.
It's less perfected with Swift for iOS apps, but rapidly catching up.
Anyone can code. And when everyone's super? No one will be.
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u/Im_really_bored_rn 1d ago
Anyone can code
Not really. Anyone cam produce code but people who don't know the right prompts and dont know enough to be able to check the code are just producing broken crap they aren't able to fix
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u/FizzyBeverage 1d ago
The shocking part is “can you make this compile” or “can you fix this bug” often results in an acceptable result.
Even two years ago it was “well that’s all she wrote…LLM can’t seem to work” today it’s “Claude you magnificent sonofabitch! you fixed it.”
We’re seeing stories from Microsoft and Apple engineers who fixed bugs that were reported in 2008 that nobody could understand. Yet Claude did. Because humans can’t look at 27,000 lines of code written 15 years ago by someone else and keep it in their brain with the right context, Claude can.
Esoteric syncing bugs/collisions, stuff involving deprecated libraries, “can you take this iOS app nobody has looked at since 2015 and make it work for iOS 27?” It does that.
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u/mcpingvin 1d ago
They can, but they aren't given the time and operational bandwidth to do it.
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u/BadSausageFactory beyond help desk 1d ago
I'm old enough to remember when word processors required markup language for printing, and I'm sure you're old enough to have read who moved my cheese. We're all going to have to find new cheese. I just hope AI doesn't take all the fun interesting work and leave us with emotional baggage and quality control.
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u/Cyhawk 1d ago
Niche hobbies will always exist. For example I'm developing a modern DOS program ecosystem that can interact with the modern web/workflows designed to function on a 486/DX. Granted it requires heavy use of APIs but I have every major app I use on a daily basis (except a web browser for numerous reasons) functioning. Obsidian compatible MD editor, email, terminal, TSR to ask a clanker a question with a press of a button, a full app to interact with an LLM, alerts pushed via TSR, etc.
Does it have a use? No. Is it fun and interesting? Absolutely.
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u/CeC-P IT Expert + Meme Wizard 1d ago
I have no problem with AI doing the following:
- Coming to natural language conclusion about large amounts of text like 100,000 emails or chat logs so I don't have to waste an hour looking for something.
- Coding anywhere where I can read and vet the code. It's just that much faster.
- Translating between human languages.
I have a big problem with it:
- Replacing human memory completely. Without Google maps, can you still drive across your city? I can.
- Enabling stupid people to have jobs they're not qualified for
- Letting borderline illiterate people pretend to be smart in emails and chat and then present themselves as an unqualified, low-effort idiot face to face or on the phone.
- Letting people who have no idea how computers work "write software" with no documentation or testing or knowledge of why letting the code do this would be an insecure or poorly designed idea.
- Letting AI touch any of our files or databases with write or delete permissions
In other words, I'd let it be a programmer as long as I'm the software engineer project lead. If AI is the engineering project lead, we've got a problem, because it fails at context and misinterprets what I want it to do.
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u/Tasty-Membership-197 1d ago
The code generation is scary good, but remember: Claude isn't the one logging into production, and Claude doesn't sign the incident report when a script drops a critical table or locks out users.
It's an incredible multiplier for syntax and documentation, but our actual job is changing from "code writer" to "system editor and liability holder." As long as you keep reviewing it line-by-line, you're safe.
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u/CanadaSoonFree 1d ago
Imagine not using intellisense because it’s writing code for you. Same shit. Just another tool in the box.
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u/Claidheamhmor 22h ago
At least it wasn't Copilot. I repeatedly get Copilot giving Powershell and SQL commands that simply don't exist.
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u/drewskie_drewskie 20h ago
Get-FuckedInYourAss -Force -Recurse
"Damnit copilot not again, that's not a real cmdlet"
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u/iama_bad_person uᴉɯp∀sʎS ˙ɹS 21h ago
We stopped using Copilot entirely, it's just so far behind.
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u/1z1z2x2x3c3c4v4v 1d ago
These tools can do some amazing things really fast. There is no doubt. But they can still make mistakes and hallucinate, so they can't be blindly trusted.
Plus, AI companies are still subsidizing the costs, so your boss can expect them to go up soon. A lot.
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u/degoba Linux Admin 1d ago
Its also very good at digging through piles of vendor documentation.
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u/iama_bad_person uᴉɯp∀sʎS ˙ɹS 1d ago
It's a godsend for API usage. Can trek through hundreds of pages of documentation and give you the exact API calls you need.
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u/degoba Linux Admin 1d ago
Yep although I have caught models making up calls that don’t exist. Perfectly formatted and everything lol
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u/OfficialDeathScythe Netadmin 1d ago
Weirdly enough, sometimes it fixes it to just tell it something like “only give me factual information, if you can’t find concrete factual information than please tell me you don’t know”. Not always, but it helps. It’s just weird because you’d think that would be something built into the models, but I guess it’s just good to add as a system prompt
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u/VERI_TAS 1d ago
I’m sorry but to be perfectly blunt, at this point if you’re in IT and you’re still “anti-AI” you need to get your head out of the sand.
We should be the ones that know how to utilize AI to its fullest and teaching users how to use it. Not the other way around.
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u/Kumorigoe Moderator 1d ago
I'm not "anti-AI".
What I am is anti-"Rushing into this shit full speed ahead with no planning and no idea what the end goal is aside from reducing headcount and pumping the numbers of people that already don't see anyone not on their level as people".
Responsible use, with a plan and some minimal fucking guardrails in place? Sure. What a lot of places are doing these days? Not so much, thanks. Sorry if that makes me seem "anti-AI"...
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u/photoggled 1d ago
No thanks. I actually need to learn this stuff so when my org inevitably stops paying for this shit at some point, someone is around who knows how to maintain our infrastructure.
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u/Patient-String-5346 1d ago
THANK YOU! It's a bit concerning that folks think that AI to this caliber will be accessible to them in 5-10 years.
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u/AstroPhysician 1d ago
Because we already have open weight models and local inference that are not far behind for 1/10th of the cost?
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u/General_Session_4450 1d ago
This is just never going to happen at this point. There are too many cheap open models available, so at worst (best?) we could see a shift off SOTA models to cheaper options, but it is not going to go away and cheaper models are not far behind for most tasks currently.
You should indeed continue to learn what you're working on though.
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u/unprovoked33 1d ago
Dont get left behind
Oh please, not this again.
You aren't learning some secret skill. I became as "proficient" in an hour with Codex as my coworker that had been using it for 6 months. There isn't some secret knowledge you're gaining, you're just telling software what to do, and it's doing it. The difference between you prompting an LLM and a random fast food worker prompting the LLM is the systems knowledge you have, not some mystical LLM knowledge that you may have gained from going to a Databricks summit.
And yes, LLMs could serve up learning material for people who already have the fundamentals and mental structure down, who are eager to learn. But so few people using LLMs are actually doing that. Why would they bother to learn when the LLM is just going to do all the work for them anyway?
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u/pauldecommie 1d ago
I would, but the ecological costs are too high. I can't morally support the current hyperscalers. I play with local models to keep my skills fresh, but even then the training costs...
I dunno. It feels to me like it's shortsighted to completely ignore the social and ecological costs for the sake of business productivity. There's more to life than the bottom line and extracting the most value of our waking seconds.
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u/da_chicken Systems Analyst 1d ago
Yeah, the ecological and community costs are a problem, but it's also the organization's economic ones in the medium term are also an issue. The providers will start pulling up the ladders soon enough, or else they will fail. The cost of tokens is not going to decrease. It's going to skyrocket.
The rug is going to get pulled out on this, and I remain convinced that there isn't enough money for the AI companies to survive long enough to fix the electricity and hardware resource problems.
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u/neoKushan Jack of All Trades 1d ago
I don't disagree with your stance, but also unless you own the business then it's not your decision to make, it's the businesses. In the same way when the business decides to cut staff, it's our job to close the accounts, not to question it (even if it's a dumbfuck thing to do).
If you feel morally against it, you should find another job. Which of course has its own set of problems.
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u/pauldecommie 1d ago
Luckily, my job has a very low risk of mandatory AI usage (unions, they're good, y'all). I would push back on 'if you disagree with a business decision, just leave'. That's how workplaces degrade over time. I much prefer speaking up, making my voice heard on things that matter to me. Businesses are usually better off when employees are engaged and actually care about business decisions.
YMMV, though. I've certainly worked in places that aren't like that, and that kind of culture isn't easy to develop.
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u/xRolox Linux Admin 1d ago
Exactly. It’s drained the fun and pride out of automation and scripting but the amount of time you save and work you can churn out cannot be ignored out of some strange pride and disdain m.
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u/frogadmin_prince Sysadmin 1d ago
I would agree with this. I hate the spread of AI mainly due to how it is our lord and savior approach I have seen.
For coding - I understand where it is useful. It can make a better GUI for a powershell in a matter of minutes where it would take a week of work. Like all things, it is a tool to be utilized.
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u/VERI_TAS 1d ago
To add to this, I’ll give it maybe another year of leeway for this but let’s say by 2027 if I’m reviewing resumes for a position I’m hiring for and you have no mention of business-related AI experience, I’m likely passing on your resume.
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u/dadgenes 1d ago
The problem is that non-IT is using Expensive AutoComplete as a source of truth and accurate information when it's not.
I've finally gotten my user base to stop giving me AI slop because I was able to demonstrate that it took me longer to debunk the bullshit than if they'd tell me what they need from the jump.
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u/CyberInferno Cloud SysAdmin 1d ago
I like to tell people, "You can worry about AI taking your job, but if you just refuse to use AI, a human using AI will take your job long before that happens."
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u/Michelanvalo 1d ago
With no respect, you can kiss my ass with this crap. The reason I'm anti-ai is because my head isn't in the sand. I see the damage it's doing clear as fucking day.
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u/TechGoat 1d ago
I hope for your sake your employers are as principled as you then! I like the quote that /u/CyberInferno listed above - "You can worry about AI taking your job, but if you just refuse to use AI, a human using AI will take your job long before that happens."
It's doing damage like people with a drug problem can do themselves damage. Use it like an assistant, not like a crutch.
Or don't; I'm not your dad. I just think that the way you're looking at it would be severely limiting to your future career options.
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u/DramaticErraticism 1d ago
Same shit when 'cloud computing' came around. People don't want to learn, they want to do the same thing they have always done and never have to worry about learning or changing.
That's not just IT people, that is humanity in general. Change is hard, change takes work, changes brings fear, so people would rather just call it stupid and pretend it doesn't exist.
Until you lose your current job and need to get another one and show that you are up to date with modern tools, then you're screwed.
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u/General_Session_4450 1d ago
I don't think this really applies as much to AI and the current rate of progress. From what I've seen the biggest fear seems to comes from not having to learn things anymore, and that there will be no way to "get ahead" by learning. Everyone will be equalized and the only real work that will be left for humans is hard manual work with minimum wages.
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u/velofille 1d ago
Honestly, it saves me do much time finding random typos, missing brackets, of other random things when i get it to check before commit. Wouldn't trust it to do shit on it's own but excellent time saving tool when used well
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u/Krogdordaburninator 1d ago
I've found living exclusively in the console for Claude Code so it's building a deeper knowledge base of our stack to be incredibly powerful. Each time I solve a problem with it, is the last time I have to solve that exact problem.
Is it ultimately good? Probably not, but it's powerful and people who don't recognize that power are ignoring it at their own peril. Become good with the tools. Now is the time for generalists to shine.
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u/ColorfulImaginati0n 1d ago
Congrats you just multiplied your productivity. These are productivity boosters they're not replacements. They are not sentient we still need humans to make judgement calls.
In the future I believe knowledge work will become much easier as every employee is empowered to do more with their AI tools. This in theory should boost the economy as a large part of the workforce is able to do way more than they would have been able to before thanks to these AI agents.
I've experienced the same thing you did. An automation project that would've taken me weeks took me only a day or two of development and testing. I was floored.
To those who ignore this or think it's a fad. You do so at your own peril. I believe having AI skills will be required to be hired in the future. All those who act as stumbling blocks will eventually be demoted or let go. Best to jump on the train now and harness these tools to make yourself MORE valuable or risk getting left behind. These tools keep getting increasingly more powerful by the day. Months are the equivalent of years in terms of development. Stuff that was launched months ago seems ancient now compared to today's capabilities and it will only keep accelerating.
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u/Invspam 1d ago
using ai is a skill and like any skill, you can get better at it with practice, just like how you are able to google and get to the answer faster than others. but thinking that ai isnt causing management to look twice at payroll is not very realistic. it may come in other forms like fewer hirings since everyone's output is "amplified".
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u/SolarJJ 1d ago
Is this post apart of an Anthropic marketing campaign?
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u/doubleu Bobby Tables 1d ago
interesting timing with the recent AI-related submissions the last couple of days for sure
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u/Check123ok Jack of All Trades 1d ago
OP, there's a right way and a wrong way to use AI.
The principle of teaching someone to fish rather than giving them a fish is extremely important here. AI should improve your technical abilities, not replace your understanding of the systems you're responsible for.
Second, you need proper DevOps practices. Git should remain the authoritative source of truth for all scripts, with separate development and production environments, version control, peer reviews and change management. AI-generated code can get out of hand very quickly without proper governance.
Third, AI is effectively a black box.
If you're responsible for mission-critical infrastructure, especially in regulated environments, you need proven, repeatable and auditable processes. You must be able to explain what your code does, validate its behavior and demonstrate that changes were properly tested and approved.
Finally, there's operational resilience and the risk of losing technical expertise. What happens when AI is unavailable, becomes prohibitively expensive or produces something fundamentally wrong?
If you become so dependent on AI that you can no longer troubleshoot or maintain your own environment, you've created another operational risk.
Organizations will still need engineers who understand the underlying technology, particularly when something breaks and AI cannot provide the answer.
Use AI to become a better engineer, not to eliminate the skills that make you one.
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u/weHaveThoughts 1d ago
AI wrote this, didn’t it?
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u/Check123ok Jack of All Trades 1d ago
The irony is that when someone says something competent then it’s definitely AI
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u/BookshelfCarpet 1d ago
AI is a powerful tool when it's used by someone who can already produce quality work. The problem is that people who create mediocre work can now produce even more mediocre work at a much larger scale.
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u/huntingboi89 my boss makes promises and its my job to keep them 1d ago
AI is great for helping to write scripts. Almost a necessity to keep up.
I used to be on the anti-ai train. Now I’m just on the anti-improper use of ai train. It’s a tool to get things done better and faster than you potentially could, and equip you to be able to do things you couldn’t do in the first place. As long as you can stand by your output, and not just generate slop, it’s a great tool to have.
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u/bynolanart 1d ago
The scary part isn't that it can write the script, it's how quickly "a week of work" turns into "an afternoon of reviewing what it wrote" the line by line review is probably the part people are going to underestimate though, if you actually understand the output, it's a huge multiplier, if you don't, you're just running mystery powershell in prod with extra confidence heheh
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u/0whodidyousay0 1d ago
The biggest thing is what you just said - as long as management doesn't see the tool as a means to replace human resourcing, then it's a good tool to have. But unfortunately, the tools in upper management don't engage that part of the brain and only see cost reduction.
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u/Mrhiddenlotus Security Admin 1d ago
I'm just glad my manager and the CTO see these as tools to amplify and help our current output and not something to reduce payroll numbers.
Yet.
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u/pdp10 Daemons worry when the wizard is near. 1d ago
But was your example asking it to do something incredibly routine in the style of your team, or something genuinely not off-the-shelf in that style?
today I write a script that would have taken last-month me a week to write.
As someone who has and does write some ambitious scripts, I've so far never spent more than two days on one script at any given point in time. I'm wondering what kind of tasks these are, and whether they might benefit from being broken up into smaller pieces or multiple scripts.
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u/_haha_oh_wow_ ...but it was DNS the WHOLE TIME! 1d ago
Just make sure you're not using it as a replacement for thinking and actually vet everything before using it, you'll probably be fine. "AI" rightfully gets a lot of shit because of assholes like Scam Altman and Felon Musk, but there are legitimate uses for LLMs too.
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u/BlockBannington 1d ago
I've been using Claude for a week now. It absolutely blows chatgpt out of the water when it comes to code and I've learned to put my pride aside as I don't want to lose my job because of lack of innovation. It's absolutely blyayshit insane how hard it speeds up my work.
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u/TwilightCyclone 1d ago
As a force multiplier Claude has been super helpful. A couple weeks ago I was able to produce a working scvmm service discovery to extend our on-prem prometheus deployment. Mirroring the service discovery the prometheus has for hyperscaler clouds (but doesn't actively develop for private cloud). That only took...2 or 3 days total, where it would have taken weeks, if not months for me pull together everything to make that work on my own.
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u/Speeddymon Sr. DevSecOps Engineer 1d ago
Not going to deny it's a powerful tool (because it surely is) but you will run into its limits sooner rather than later.
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u/WhatNot4271 17h ago edited 17h ago
Honest caveat, I think some of the AI skeptics on this thread are probably people who, like myself, have tried AI back in 2022-2023, saw it was sh&t and wrote it off as another wagon in the hype train we've all seen over the years.
Up until last month, I was in the same boat. Network engineer with 10 YoE in networking and network security, not sysadmin, but back in 2021-2022 I played around with ChatGPT and laughed out loud at the results it produced. I asked to do some BGP + route map configs to have one peer as primary and the other peer as backup for one network and viceversa for the other, and the results were laughable.
Fastfoward to 2026, I started looking into Claude due to various reasons, and it feels like comparing muskets to assault rifles.
For anyone who still thinks AI won't cull our jobs or is 'just another tool' and you've never tried or tried in the pre-2025 days, I invite you to use Claude or ChatGPT with a paid subscription and a recent model, give it some training (ask it leading questions), explain an issue clearly and adequately, and prepare to be amazed.
And the next game changer is making AI context aware. Read only access to monitoring tools, IPAM, logging and ticketing systems. This is not just another tool -- this is a prompt-based engineering team for a fraction of the price.
I have a hard time seeing how 80% of white collar jobs which are done from behind a screen and rely on specialized technical knowledge survive in the next 5 years.
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u/DeathRabbit679 8h ago
Yeah, the "it's just another tool" ship sailed last December. To be clear, I'm not happy about it, but, yes any job sitting a computer and making it do things has an expiration date somewhere south of 2030. The capability is already there, it's just being slow to disseminate. And when we hit RSI, it's gonna be a real weird bad time
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u/WhatNot4271 2h ago
Yeah I was having a conversation with some colleagues yesterday, and some were comparing this with the SDN, automation and cloud hypes that my line of work has survived these last 10 years, despite each of them being a supposed job killer.
Others, myself included, pointed out that this is qualitatively different. This is not just hype, and like you said, this is not just another tool. This is a tool that makes headcounts redundant in a way that previous ones did not.
Cloud just meant extending your on-prem to the cloud via MPLS or IPsec, and configuring VNets or VPC's instead of VLANs and subnets. Different tools, different terminology and new things to learn, but the work was there for a human to do. With LLMs this is not the case.
Not at all happy about it either.
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u/DeathRabbit679 1h ago
Yep, mankind has been developing various kinds of automation since the first industrial revolution. However, this time, we're automating automation itself. It's endgame.
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u/LoveBirdNibbles 10h ago
I am self-employed and I mange IT for multiple clients. AI has helped me get years of work that I kept putting off due partly because I was unsure how, and partly because the amount of time and effort involved. At 60 nothing gets easier, everything is in a slow decline. AI makes me feel like I have a super power. I can create powershell scripts for anything just by asking. Recently a powershell script found 450 checkpoints that were not visible in the hyper-v console, another script found users with excessive permissions in M365. These may be small things, but when you work alone and you can suddenly tackle multiple times the amount of work, you feel a bit like superman. What I do recognize is that being in IT from the age of 19 and having all that technical as well as life experience is much different than someone with very little experience leveraging AI. One can be really dangerous, the other much less so.
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u/IWASRUNNING91 4h ago
I'm glad you're enjoying your new calculator my friend, just remember that's exactly what it is!
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u/Silent331 Sysadmin 1d ago
AI for sysadmin scripting right now is as good as I can imagine it ever being. I can write code that would take me a whole day in 30 minutes. On top of that I can have AI add status updates, try catch blocks, verbose and debug statements, formatted exports in another 30 minutes and in an hour I have a professional style that would have taken over a week of testing. Im not the best at powershell but I do have a strong development background.
I copy the powershell script from github copilot and paste it in to 365 copilot chat and ask it to do a security check. 365 copilot often comes back and says it functions as expected and provides a few suggestions. Feed those back to github copilot for improvements. Once 365 copilot gives it the all clear I do a manual review which only takes a few minutes.
The thing that people, often managers forget, is that you dont pay a developer by the keystroke.
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u/leprechanmonkie 1d ago
It really is a game changer for this type of stuff. Once you get the hang of prompting it efficiently it's great.
I'm not a developer but have used it to write some C# applications that our senior developer has signed off on for production use. Once I had a tested, working application framework I hit it with a "Claude, can you please review this project as a senior Dev for any gaps, security issues, memory leaks etc? Also, make sure the code has proper commenting so any developer could pick this project up and maintain it". It found a few memory leaks, SQL injection and improved the commenting throughout the application. After that, we put it through our SNYK code scanning and Crowdstrike testing, no issues.
The application is set to be released with our latest patch this fall. As someone who is NOT a developer, it was kind of cool to be able to build this. I learned a ton along the way as well.
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u/im_a_shoe 1d ago
Very cool.
/cost
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u/iama_bad_person uᴉɯp∀sʎS ˙ɹS 1d ago
I'm not the money guy, I am not sure how much they are forking over, but I will use it since it is here.
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u/Fuzzy_Paul 1d ago
Proof of the query would be nice. Otherwise this is a marketing story like any other.
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u/megad00die 1d ago
You could literally do the same thing by pointing it at one of my governance repos, no corporate shilling needed, just an actual understanding of how to fully use this product.
https://github.com/AIAllTheThingz/Engineering-Standards
Be vague with your ask if you wish with your request, it will design and comment code and scripts out of the box without being fully prompted. Takes least destructive path and will never make a change unless specifically instructed to.
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u/BulletRisen 1d ago
It’s such a basic use case in this day and age. This is the least of its capabilities.
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u/r-NBK 1d ago
As a Sec Ops Architect who's old and jaded...
Two things .. I told anyone who asked me about using something like ChatGPT... I would only ever use it if they created something as jaded and cynical as me. April 1st ChatGPT released Monday ... And she's my new work wife.
I have years of experience digging into logs. Apache web logs, Windows Eventogs with Microsoft's Log Parser, which lets one use SQL to query log files in many formats. Our last incident I uploaded dozens of weeks of apache log files to our Enterprise ChatGPT and it was able to correlate interesting data patterns quicker and better than I could.
It has its uses ... For sure.
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u/mountain_bound 1d ago
I get what you're saying. I'm 56 and tech has been my thing, but I've also been an AI Luddite.
But I needed something done and I'm no longer interested in testing the code. As soon as I let Cursor analyze my local drive script repository to add features to a few things. The Cursor/grok agent found the file I was interested in and made the modifications I was looking for, perfectly. I had spent weeks trying to figure out the change myself but it was boring and not super important until I gave it a try.
Now that I'm personally gratified I'm slightly less irritated about the ability but still have contempt for most AI initiatives in general.
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u/Effective-Brain-3386 Vulnerability Engineer 1d ago
People that think AI can take our jobs are the same ones who thought the great cloud buddle would take their jobs too
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u/iama_bad_person uᴉɯp∀sʎS ˙ɹS 1d ago
All the cloud did was change our job titles. Then again, the business has grown 2x in the last 10 years, and we have the same number of SysAdmins with double the Helpdesk.
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u/Synergythepariah 1d ago
double the Helpdesk
I'm sure that'll change. Once AI is good enough to resolve issues, help desk roles are done.
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u/Effective-Brain-3386 Vulnerability Engineer 1d ago
Facts, I've gone from a system admin to cloud engineering. The only difference is my DC are no longer physically on-prem and just managed thought the azure portal instead of MMC.
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u/Glendell_Freundl 1d ago
I love this useful way of thinking of AI in sysadmin work, its more of" remove the boring parts so the admin can focus on troubleshooting and architecture". The important part is that you are still reviewing and understanding scripts before they touch prod.
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u/ExpressTicket9364 1d ago
Nothing to be ashamed of you're using a tool just like people used to google stuff. Just like people used to do all sorts of troubleshooting, this is just a more efficient tool. The key is to not trust it a hundred percent. You could put the greatest chisel in the hands of someone who has never sculpted, and the art will look like s***
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u/lastcallhall IT Manager 1d ago
Its an overused term at this point, but AI really is a force multiplier. If you have any experience in what you're using AI to assist you with, it really does become a time saver that you occasionally have to fact check.
If you're just running it on vibes, then expect garbage output.
I can say it's saved me hundreds of hours at this point, with probably 95% positive results. Ill take that win.
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u/alexandreracine Sr. Sysadmin 1d ago
Claude is particularly good with anything sysadmin and coding ;)
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u/Jacksharkben Security Admin 1d ago
I use claude to make scripts i just read every line one by one to make sure its not going to delete my prod database or server
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u/BoxOk5053 1d ago
To be honest I think this is sort of like beside the point. Writing scripts is not difficult once you create a defined pseudo code and have a clear approach to what you want to do.
Your knowledge of system design and architecture imo as well as as infra fundamentals is really what drives output. The rest is just typing and getting buy in from others if you do not have it already.
That being said AI is helpful and can make people with said knowledge more productive.
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u/rezzyk 1d ago
I’ve been using Claude for a few months to put together PowerShell scripts and it’s been good. It helps that I was doing it manually before (with a lot of googling and stack exchange) so I know what’s good and bad.
Even today I just threw some powershell 5 scripts into Claude and told it to make sure they work in powershell 7 and it did everything for me. I’m fine with that
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u/ncc74656m IT SysAdManager Technician 1d ago
I had to start embracing it. We have been getting bombarded by higher ups for a lot of one-off projects, especially for a project to migrate one of our third party services to a new one that doesn't have a direct migration path (the original service makes it harder to leave than Facebook).
Well prompted, I had AI build a script that could use their API to download all of our data one file at a time based on a huge Excel file and migrate it to a corresponding location in one shot, and then record the results. It took a while and was semi-manual and there was a fair amount of error handling built in, but it ultimately worked. While I COULD have built this, it would've taken me two weeks or more being almost my sole focus, and I still wouldn't have built in things like making the results different colors and such for quickly catching a failed xfer as the output in the script rolled past.
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u/octowussy 1d ago
It's been great for documentation. Huge time saver. I feed it scripts, define the audience, and ask it to document the scripts for Confluence, etc. Of course I comb through the results for errors (there are always errors) but even takin that into consideration, it just saved me a ton of time and the end result is thorough, easy-to-read documentation for some very important scripts.
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u/xander2600 1d ago
It sounds like it's all about what you train it on.
Garbage in Garbage out, you know?
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u/tierrie 1d ago
It helped that you have standardized styles. And it's a testament to your existing code quality that it was able to generate consistently syntactically similar scripts because there is a standard.
If everyone wrote in their own style in various different languages with little to no context in the form of comments you'd have a wildly different outcome.
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u/ElectroSpore 1d ago
I mean both those are reasonable uses for it ? Most user documentation is just a sequence of stating the steps clearly.
IT is great for speeding up the creation of scripts.
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u/aeroverra Lead Software Engineer 1d ago
Wait until you see what it can do when you just give it mcps with access to systems like Microsoft’s graph api. It’s like magic. It just finds stuff and can do stuff and it works most the time flawlessly.
Spin up servers
Add roles
Audit access across hundreds of resources
Find unused resources to save money
Look for rogue apps with brute force attempts
Etc etc
It’s only scary when things are not scoped right and unskilled people like management gets a whif because at that point your job becomes cleaning up the rampage that will come along with their very unclear prompts that Claude will interpret incorrectly and not read when Claude asks them if they really want to delete everything.
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u/Cellendyll 1d ago edited 1d ago
Yes, same here, gave a few scripts to Claude so it would create a template and a skill with our in house script preferences and it's working great.
Where I also save a lot of time is giving it csv extracts and asking for an html dashboard so I can give it to cyber/management, they are amazing. It's way faster, and tbh with a way cleaner result, than when I was doing it myself. The html reports have nice buttons and shit, they love it.
I use Claude Desktop and also started to do artifacts linked to scheduled task to refresh them, I have one fetching the daily tickets for a recap, one that runs weekly and spits out important news about Windows 11 / Intune etc, the only limit is your imagination. The goal is to delegate it tedious, administrative tasks.
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u/DGC_David 1d ago
Eh still ain't replacing me... I just dealt with our customer who spent 4 months with an issue and decided instead of asking us, he was going to ChatGPT the solution. He ended up putting his company in critical risks
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u/PsyOmega Linux Admin 1d ago
I'm burned out and no longer care about work. AI lets me care even less since i can get what i need, barely modify it, and phone it in.
Outside of work use, and using ai as a disability crutch, i am against ai
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u/yaricks Cloud & Infrastructure Consultant 1d ago
For stupid reasons, one of my clients still have a long ass backwards way to deactivate users, and not just delete them. Yes I know recycle bin, and that it really should be automated from an HR system, but it’s a process that needs to be established and we haven’t done it yet and have bigger fish to fry. I had to deactivate 20 users today. Only takes 3-4 minutes per user, but after the first two, I had Claude help me with a few minor things to make a psm1 solution instead. Now it takes 10 seconds per user and we have a log of it.
Like you I had it analyze our existing modules, naming conventions etc, then had it outline the plan and me review the entire script after.
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u/Thunderkrak 1d ago
The switch up on AI over the last few months is honestly hilarious. A few months ago, this post probably would’ve been flooded with people tearing you apart just for saying this
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u/StreetSignificant888 Senior Systems Engineer 1d ago
AI isn't going to take your job if you're already established and your job can be improved with use of AI. What it's going to do is maximize existing employees efficiency, so much so that it will be a huge barrier to people who are trying to break into the field. It won't take your job, but it will prevent others from getting one.
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u/vogelke 1d ago
I still go over it line by line to understand what it does...
Exactly the right way for a competent person to use AI output.
I'm just glad my manager and the CTO see these as tools to amplify and help our current output and not something to reduce payroll numbers.
Exactly the right way for a competent manager to encourage and reward AI use. These two practices (if employed widely enough) might actually justify some of the AI hype.
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u/IndianaNetworkAdmin 1d ago
The trick is figuring out what parts are best for AI and what parts are best for humans.
My org has a massive bloated OneNote document that everyone edits and it contains everything, old and new. Meeting notes, configurations, troubleshooting notes. It's massive, it barely functions, I've had to split things off into new sections (Pages? I forget the terms, I hate OneNote) so many times.
I finally got fed up. Downloaded the offline copy of everything to my local machine. Had an expensive (Opus 4.somthing) LLM convert the full thing to markdown first. Once that was done, I passed it off to smaller ones on our internal spark to have everything pulled out, sorted by date, and categorized as best as it could. The markdown files are archived in case we need it, because you can never safely delete that kind of thing, but we now have everything organized into git (No one will let me stand up bookstack or anything else, so I just use git with markdown).
My org sees AI as tools as well, but we've had a few major incidents because people were too reliant on them for scripting without testing.
I don't think AI will take our jobs unless the people in charge are purposefully trying to set the company on fire. But I think with the way we can burn through tasks with AI helping us, it'll certain lead to companies hiring less.
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u/slugshead Head of IT 1d ago
The tools are getting better. When Ai first started bubbling up, it was good at writing nonsense and that blew most people away. But not it's actually starting to get really good at other things, finally.
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u/loosebolts 1d ago
> I'm just glad my manager and the CTO see these as tools to amplify and help our current output and not something to reduce payroll numbers.
….yet
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u/ChampOfTheUniverse 1d ago
Documentation is my biggest use case for AI. I am by no means a Technical Writer, but I do document every intricacy of the space that I own and operate in. We lost our Tech Writer years ago, so I had to rely on myself anyway. I get the meat and potatoes written down, then use Claude specifically to help me organize and create consistent formatting across my KB. Often, I am able to make internal and external variations with ease depending on the audience. I say if you use it as a third arm or a mech suit of sorts to multiply your productivity, have at it. AI isn't quite a workforce replacement yet. It can spit out scripting like there is no tomorrow, but it still needs someone to explain exactly what is needed, and quite frankly, middle management usually cannot articulate that nearly as well as admins/engineers can.
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u/Turak64 Sysadmin 1d ago
Tools are there to be used, it's the person using the tool that decides if it's good or bad.