CEO wants everyone to use an AI. I have zero idea on what I can use it for.

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kfries@reddit

I’ve used it for templates and scripting. One of the handiest things was sorting through syntax errors in dynamic SQL code.

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I do honestly hope that this CEO has someone tripple checking his code that hes writting with AI's help. While I am also a sysadmin with over 25 years of experence, I can tell you that while ChatGPT/Gemni etc can help, its also can be a hinderence. Its great for some tasks, doing summeries/descriptions for Git commits, emails, documents, is really amazing like being about to feed in the diffs and it saying whats been done for your git commit message. But for coding itself, its more hit and miss. Most times you have to talk to it even for hours to get what you want properly out of it and half the time you could of done it faster. With every change, it can undo changes it shoudlnt have, even though you told it not to, it just does not listen a lot of the time. I will say, building something initially or at least for newer programmers and for learning, then yes its MUCH faster then looking at docs but it wont do things like error checking, it wont think to add X or Y into it, uness you specificly tell it so.

I'm not saying AI is bad, but its also not good for these kind of tasks currently. Tasks like writting emails, summerizing things, git commit messages, comparing things, its amazing for and generally gets it right straight away and or just needs a little extra talking, but from my experence, it cant write something decent without someone with half a brain knowing that the program should have X or Y.

As for sysadmin tasks, it can be used to help craete ansible playbooks or help you configure something your not aware of, but anything which it spews needs tripple checking before running. In most cases, all the answers it gives, are out of date, theres better/newer methods to do and this is likely to do with the data sets it learns from.

I do believe in a few years, it be at the right level, but currently right now, its far form it IMHO.

Oh do I think our jobs are still safe/secure, yes, yes I do, but I think AI can help us with some of the muldane tasks but it cant replace everything that we do. I would worry more for general office staff, they likely will be the first to go.

Just my two cents.

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9KZTZ4GJLMFCVCBUPBK4@reddit

You just wrote your first prompt!

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Low_Examination_5114@reddit

This should be at the top

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LosAtomsk@reddit

underrated comment :D

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ElectroSpore@reddit

It is generally good at creating starting points for script as if they where made by an intern, that you need to carefully read before running.

Can it consistently give the right answer to non-trivial sets of objects?

Because GPT will happily try to answer any problem you throw at it, whether it knows the correct answer or not. To make things worse, it usually doesn't have any way of recognizing which problems it actually knows answers to or not.

So the fact that it "can" provide an answer really just means the human programmers didn't think to put safeguards on your particular topic. It doesn't mean the AI is capable of general reasoning and didn't just hallucinate an answer.

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wordworse@reddit

but it can't tell you how many "r"s are in "strawberry"

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Own-Custard3894@reddit

SmarterChild

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Robertsipad@reddit

ChatGPT: Here are some metaphors in a similar playful tone:

A well-read parrot that sometimes squawks random facts.
A library that occasionally misfiles the books under "fiction."
A GPS that gives great directions but occasionally sends you on a scenic detour.
A wizard who casts powerful spells, but sometimes conjures a rubber duck instead of a dragon.
A sous-chef who expertly chops vegetables but sometimes seasons with sugar instead of salt.

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deltashmelta@reddit

"RAWK MURDER IS ILLEGAL."

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KupoMcMog@reddit

I've always said it can perfectly recreate a human skeleton, but the feet are where the hands should be and the hands are fused in the ribcage.

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It is especially funny as she works in the medical field and uses AI for patient notes and while reading through the notes she’ll find AI is creating fake patients and fake conditions that were never part of the transcript. She has worked the prompt to the point where she has to tell the AI to just stick to the facts, do not embellish, if it doesn’t understand a term to just put question marks around it instead of making shit up.

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One_Stranger7794@reddit

I like the last one.

Sometimes an AI will give you something that looks OK, but on closer inspection is completely wrong and is basically ruined/non-functional.

gif

Blurst is a steady part of my vocabulary these days. So many things can be described as the blurst.

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m_night_shullman@reddit

Apes together strong

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quasides@reddit

the term is now hallucinations. the thing is LLM`s should not work at all based on current mathematical theory - for real the math guys are still trying to figure out why it even works, its a thing. but somehow they do to some degree. but it seems to break down rather quickly hence hallucinations.

which also means we are still not really closer to real ai, but ofc interacting run loose LLMs can produce something weird aka like a bunch of meth addicts on steroids.

That's essentially the outlook that the "best practices" for my local engineering association is taking. (I'd also suggest adding 'the intern is the CEO's cousin' so you can't say anything bad about it.)

It's outstanding for looking up parts and giving baseline suggestions, but everything MUST be verified by a human. If you don't know an API, ask an AI, then look up those suggestions. Or "hey, can you compare these two firewalls"

I've been using AI in my designs for about a year and change now. It's saved me a huge amount of time.

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Brawldud@reddit

Lol definitely one of my favorite/least favorite things is when it makes up flags or function args that would be super useful if they existed but they don't

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byteuser@reddit

For Python at least they solved that problem over a year ago by having Chatgpt run the code in the background before outputting it. Oddly enough, I noticed a markedly improvement around the same time for Powershell. So much so that it went from heavy hallucinations for PS code to none. As for the quality of the code LLMs can generate your mileage can vary wildly

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Brawldud@reddit

I'm describing a PS hallucination from last week. They're definitely still around.

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nospamkhanman@reddit

My favorite is when it tries to add args that don't exist, you tell it the args don't exist and it's like "Ooops you are correct, xyz does not exist".

Then you're like, so fix it.

you tell it the args don't exist and it's like "Ooops you are correct, xyz does not exist".

You ever try to play a game with it?

I wrote a Battleship program in college MANY years ago, and me and a co worker decided to play it against ChatGPT to see who was better.

At first I had to "remind" it that I had sunk a ship. Like "That's the 4th hit on that boat and I already sunk your carrier - isn't that sunk now" and it's like "Oh yeah I guess it is!"

Then it tried to cheat. I think I hit his two jobber and couldn't get another hit in any of the adjacent squares. So a one hit with no adjacent spots shouldn't be possible in Battleship.

Thing is a lousy cheater...

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NoPossibility4178@reddit

Love the "I have no idea about anything you just said but if you asked me a question about an actual useful programming language then it'd have these flags which should totally be standard (because I said so) and hey, maybe they actually exist" type of response that ChatGPT sometimes throws.

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mortsdeer@reddit

Yup, I've got a small helper script that needs to be able to read QR codes out of images. I occasionally test to see if chatGPT can write it in other languages. It routinely decides that the libraries that generate QR codes must also be able to read them, right? So it hallucinates reader methods. That inevitably don't exist. I have to prompt it with "use the zimg wrapper library" or some such. Prompt engineering is a thing.

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bgradid@reddit

see , I'm more of an "ideas" guy

I think I'd do okay with using AI to come up with code.

I understand logic, used to tutor it in college ... but I can't remember syntax or commands at all.

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SkullRunner@reddit

That's the problem... you get better at talking to it like a toddler and asking the right questions in the right order to get an output that's 90% there and still needs to be reviewed and worked over.

Depending on what you're doing... might as well just started doing the end solution yourself the "hard" way.

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PandaBoyWonder@reddit

As of right now, yes, but over time it will continue to improve. It will quickly be smarter and more capable than the average skilled professional at any task

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SirLoremIpsum@reddit

It will quickly be smarter and more capable than the average skilled professional at any task

I dunno about the 'any task'.

It utterly lacks any kind of creativity or adaptability.

It will be faster at certain, specific things

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pdp10@reddit

They said that in the '60s.

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rjkirkpatrick@reddit

The idea that AI with exponentially scale forever is way off. It's already starting to plateau.

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Eisenstein@reddit

But we won't know that until it because obvious, so you are either wrong or right, but that is completely dependent on the current data and trend and your intuition. The data and the trends show that it is plateauing in overall knowledge, not specialized knowledge, and goal is to make them more efficient using fewer parameters (hence can be run using less computer and less juice).

In other words -- 'well, that's just like your opinion, man'.

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rjkirkpatrick@reddit

Maybe you are unfamiliar with tech S curve phenomenon?

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Eisenstein@reddit

I can assume that that means, and I am pretty sure that if you could predict when those curves happened during the time they were happening then a few people would be a lot less rich and a lot more people would have a lot more job security. So, just because we know something is inevitable doesn't mean we know when it is going to happen.

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rjkirkpatrick@reddit

"Your opinion is as valuable as anyone else's". Yea, no shit...it's......an opinion.

My question is - what data do you have that's any more valuable?

My opinion has to do with current hardware availability and acceleration rate of the thing AI NEEDS TO FUNCTION. Doesn't matter how fast their LLM is if the backbone to support it doesn't exist. Please enlighten me how we get past this hardware acceleration gap.

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Eisenstein@reddit

Yea, no shit...it's......an opinion.

An opinion stated with confidence and with statement that presumed facts not supported with evidence. People reading that could assume you actually knew what you were talking about and had data to support that conclusion. You could add 'I think' or 'It seems to me' in there to make it an opinion stated as a 'no shit...it's.....an opinion' and preclude someone else pointing out that you are pulling that opinion right out of your ass.

My question is - what data do you have that's any more valuable?

I am pretty sure I acknowledged that my opinion wasn't valuable when I said 'we are all just wasting space writing this'.

Please enlighten me how we get past this hardware acceleration gap.

Like I said: by streamlining models for task efficiency.

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SkullRunner@reddit

and the more it "learns" from it's own overused garbage output in the wild the more questionable it's quality gets.

Computers were going to replace us all... so were industrial robots... etc. etc.

They always end up being tools to do very specific things, but hey tend to need a person in the loop to keep them doing those things in any meaningful way.

Not really the same thing. There's always a cutoff point where the juice isnt worth the squeeze.

For example, we have a CAD software that... two people in the whole company use. It will never meaningfully expand beyond that group.

I could spend an afternoon or two troubleshooting automated deployments of that software through our RMM software, fight with the vendor's support as to why their silent install flags give a nondescript error, etc. Or... someone could just manually install it once every four or so years when the users get new laptops. It's just not worth spending the time automating it.

It's not really any different here, a tool for the sake of tooling doesn't magically give it purpose in your workflows. If there's not a meaningful use case, the juice isnt worth the squeeze.

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pinkycatcher@reddit

Completely agree. Unless you're writing something you already know back to front, using AI will speed you up. If you're writing something you already know, why does it matter? You shouldn't really be writing code you already know that deep.

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SkullRunner@reddit

You may have noted that based on my response I am trying it to keep up with the technology and pointed out what I have found so far.

It's improved a lot since it first came out... but you need to have a very in depth understanding of what you want it to do to ask it the right questions and then review what it spit out is even safe to run, let alone work.

So "it depends" is how useful it is cause if you're using it to past in some text and asking it to format it as say CSV for a script... sounds great... until you QA it and realize it cut off the last 10 rows in the response.

Or you prompt it to write some SQL, PowerShell etc. and it randomly mixes and matches commands not available in the version you specified etc.

But you need to know more than the "time saver" at the moment to see the problem and correct them, you need the experience.

So for those of us that have been around the block for decades I agree it's like getting an intern to do things for you, cut's down on some raw bs time... but you still have to question all of the work before you trust it.

In OPs case "the org wants us all using it" nope... that's an org that does not understand the tech as it's useless to dangerous in the wrong users hands and a bit of a shortcut in the right users hands right now.

I personally find it best at taking something that's already done and working and asking it to review and refactor it for performance or version upgrades... but for complex solutions from scratch it take a lot of prompts to get it to where you want it, and that's if it does not randomly hallucinate in the middle or session reset loosing the history of the progression of questions.

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VectorB@reddit

This is key, people need to know what they are asking and how to get the AI to respond. Just because you type into a calculator 2+3 and expect to get 4, does not mean the calculator hallucinated anything.

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LilaSchneemann@reddit

ChatGPT is terrible with Ansible and bad with Terraform, for precisely the reason mentioned. It just makes up parameters and API endpoints. Copilot is great at either as a really advanced autocomplete that adjusts to your naming conventions etc. automatically. Especially with Ansible, when it works across buffers and suggests the correct names across all the open files it's really helpful. I'm not aware of an IDE or vim plugin that does this.

ChatGPT not even really good for Python and Go since it suggests deprecated ways to do things all the time - it primarily learned from blogs, and often from very old articles.

What it's great for is discussing conceptual things, parsing and contextualizing errors and giving outlines as a starting point for new setups.

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disposeable1200@reddit

You tried Claude?

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LilaSchneemann@reddit

Tried yes, but not really evaluated - couldn't see a difference at first glance, but the differences in ChatGPT models weren't very apparent at first glance, either. But I'm aware that people are saying good things about it.

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HoodRatThing@reddit

Try Claude 3.5 Sonnet.

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HoodRatThing@reddit

When was this? The newer model are very capable.

Claude 3.5 for example.

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TrueStoriesIpromise@reddit

Ask your AI how many "r"s are in the word "strawberry".

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joshikus@reddit

Even grok passes this test. It's a tokenization issue.

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TrueStoriesIpromise@reddit

It's a tokenization issue.

If my child fails this question on a test at school, should I tell the teacher "it's a tokenization issue, let them pass"?

No. Shitty tech should be called out for being shitty tech, we shouldn't make excuses for it any more than I should make excuses for my stupid (theoretical) human child.

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HoodRatThing@reddit

Why are you comparing a human child to an LLM?

Most of us perfectly understand that an LLM only mimics part of what humans are capable of, and their applications are neat and deserve to be studied.

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TrueStoriesIpromise@reddit

I use chatGPT, as others have commented on. But saying "The newer model are very capable" is is true in only a very narrow sense.

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HoodRatThing@reddit

Ask Claude 3.5 sonnet some coding questions, and it might change your mind?

I don't use ChatGPT anymore, as other as commented Claude3.5 blows ChatGPT out of the water.

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j9wxmwsujrmtxk8vcyte@reddit

You clearly don't understand what you are talking about.

That's like saying a semi-truck is "bad tech" because it can't beat a passenger car in a quarter mile race.

If you don't understand what a tool is used for or how to use, just don't comment on it.

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My_cat_needs_therapy@reddit

Please tell us where you work that manually counting letters in words is part of your job.

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Eisenstein@reddit

I have, every time someone mentions this. Have you actually tried it?

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HoodRatThing@reddit

That's not how LLMs work. You're asking me to drive a screw with a hammer

Create a function in python that will spell the word strawberry :

Here's a Python function that spells out the word "strawberry":

def spell_word(word): spelled_out = [] for char in word: spelled_out.append(char)

return "-".join(spelled_out)

result = spell_word("strawberry") print(result)

This will output: s-t-r-a-w-b-e-r-r-y

The function does the following:

It takes a word as input and creates an empty list called spelled_out to store each character of the word.
It iterates over each character in the input word using a for loop. For every iteration, it appends that character to the spelled_out list.
After iterating through all characters, it uses the join() method on the spelled_out list with "-" as the separator. This joins all the individual characters together into one string with dashes between them.
Finally, it returns this spelled out version of the input word.

svideo@reddit

I've had very good results using both GPT-4o and Claude Sonnet 3.5 to generate compliant YAML for Ansible and at home for Home Assistant + ESPhome.

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nope_nic_tesla@reddit

Check out Ansible Lightspeed

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mortsdeer@reddit

This sort of thing is going to be the immediate future of AI models: specific trained to be experts on narrow, complex language fields.

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I use it for small cli python scripts (python seems to be the best language for chatGPT - least errors I've found) It's great for adding in options and getting all that argparse tempalte code correct.

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jmhalder@reddit

It's pretty good with Powershell. Definitely still makes some garbage that won't run. Get's me 90% of the way there normally.

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Eimee_Inkari@reddit

Wjat kind of prompts do you use that gets a 90% good result? I'm probably over complicating the prompt or just not explaining it well.

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jmhalder@reddit

We're solving different problems. It might be something as simple as "write a powershell script that remotely installs a msi to a list of computers from a SMB share"

# Define the path to the MSI file on the SMB share
$msiPath = "\\server\share\path\to\yourfile.msi"

# Define the list of remote computers (could also be read from a file)
$computers = @("Computer1", "Computer2", "Computer3")

# Define credentials (optional, depending on your setup)
$credential = Get-Credential

# Function to install MSI remotely
function Install-MSI {
    param (
        [string]$computerName,
        [string]$msiPath,
        [pscredential]$credential
    )

    $scriptBlock = {
        param (
            [string]$msiPath
        )
        # Install the MSI package
        Start-Process msiexec.exe -ArgumentList "/i `"$msiPath`" /quiet /norestart" -NoNewWindow -Wait
    }

    Invoke-Command -ComputerName $computerName -ScriptBlock $scriptBlock -ArgumentList $msiPath -Credential $credential
}

# Loop through each computer and invoke the MSI installation
foreach ($computer in $computers) {
    try {
        Write-Host "Installing MSI on $computer..."
        Install-MSI -computerName $computer -msiPath $msiPath -credential $credential
        Write-Host "Installation complete on $computer."
    } catch {
        Write-Host "Failed to install MSI on $computer. Error: $_"
    }
}

It's commented well, and if not for idiosyncrasies with Invoke-Command, may work fine. I don't see anything that would be malicious even if it doesn't actually work. "Install-msi" doesn't need to necessarily be broken out into it's own function. It scripts better than I can, that's for sure.

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AdmRL_@reddit

"Install-msi" doesn't need to necessarily be broken out into it's own function.

ChatGPT fucking loves functions doesn't it? I don't mind it but near on everything it produces has at least one.

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ProfessionalITShark@reddit

i think because it's better practice? No harcoding anything

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AdmRL_@reddit

Oh yeah that's exactly why, it says as much itself if you ask.

It's just funny seeing a single use script that's something like:

$array = @(Some,List,Items)

function SomeFunction {
  param (
    $param
  )
  try {
      $action = Do-Something $param
      return $action
  } catch {
      throw "An error occurred: $_.Exception.Message"
  }
}

foreach ($item in $array) {
  SomeFunction -param $item
}

When really all you want is:

$array = @(Some,List,Items)

foreach($item in $array) {
  Do-Something $item
}

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Windows_XP2@reddit

I just wish it had a quick and dirty option for scripts that only do one basic thing and doesn't need any error handling or anything like that. Even after asking it to dumb it down it still likes to overcomplicate things.

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ProMSP@reddit

I may be to used to my old ways, but a one-line command would probably be quicker for me to write for this task, than prompting for this "script"

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DarkangelUK@reddit

You can add that to your prompt to create a one line script which I've done in the past.

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jmhalder@reddit

I'm sure I could write this in 5-6 lines, but it wouldn't have the catch, wouldn't break out $computers, wouldn't have comments, etc.

I remember reading some new guy got a new raise because he running GPT made Active Directory scripts.

That’s going to be a when not an if that the AD is going to get royally f

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KnightNZ@reddit

I find that it's good for giving you ideas, but terrible at implementing ideas you've already good.

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f0gax@reddit

I've found that genAI is pretty much just another tool in the toolbox. It can sometimes save time parsing through examples to find out exactly what you need.

I feel like AI spends more effort trying to appear correct than actually giving me the correct data I’m asking it for.

I asked AI and it gave me this…

As a Linux sysadmin, there are several ways you could potentially leverage AI, especially with tools like ChatGPT, to improve productivity and automate some of your tasks. Here are a few practical applications:

Automating Documentation & Troubleshooting: Documenting Procedures: AI can assist in writing or improving your internal documentation, making it easier to standardize processes across the team. You can quickly generate templates or summarize long troubleshooting sessions. Command Explanations: Use AI to explain complex shell commands or scripts, and even help troubleshoot issues based on error outputs or logs.
Script & Playbook Assistance: Ansible Playbooks: You could use AI to help generate or improve your Ansible playbooks, especially for tasks where you don’t have pre-existing automation. AI could assist in suggesting modules or formatting. Bash & Python Scripts: If you need to write a custom Bash or Python script to automate tasks, AI can help you structure the code, find common mistakes, or speed up your scripting process. Validation: For scripts or playbooks you already have, AI can help review them, suggesting improvements or optimizations.
Automating Routine Tasks: Server Configuration: AI can assist in generating scripts to configure Linux VMs or even suggest configurations based on your needs. You can use it for tasks like setting up firewalls (e.g., pfSense), managing users, or installing packages. Task Generation: For repetitive tasks, AI can help generate commands to automate specific processes (e.g., log rotation, package updates).
Troubleshooting & Problem Solving: Error Log Analysis: You could feed error logs into AI tools to help diagnose problems, especially if you encounter cryptic errors. System Health Checks: AI could help you build or improve monitoring scripts to keep track of system health (CPU, RAM, disk usage, etc.) and notify you of potential issues.
Security Auditing & Compliance: Audit Automation: You could use AI to assist in generating scripts that check for compliance with your state-provided security guidelines (ISO12345 equivalent). Log Parsing: AI could help with log parsing, anomaly detection, or identifying potential security issues within your logs.
Configuration Management & Automation: Infrastructure Automation: If you’re not already automating certain tasks (like setting up new VMs or managing configurations), AI can help you speed up the process of writing scripts for that purpose. Security Configurations: For hardening your VMs or automating security rules (e.g., iptables), AI can assist by suggesting configurations or writing the necessary scripts.
Learning & Upskilling: Quick Learning: If you need a quick refresher on a specific Linux command, protocol, or tool, you could use AI to get immediate, concise explanations. Stay Updated: AI can also be used to help keep you updated with new tools or best practices in system administration, especially in areas like automation or security. It may take some experimentation to find the exact ways AI can help in your workflows, but since the company is willing to cover the AI fees, you can explore it without any financial risk.

Frankly, people that can't find a use for a massively improved search engine that can target specific knowledge bases are definitely on the way out, but it's not because AI is perfect. It's because a lot of people have been copy and pasting search results for their entire careers and can't navigate documentation in the first place.

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Zizonga@reddit

I think the problem is the communication skills of a lot of people however I also think that you need a stronger understanding of the subject than the LLM you are asking (strong enough at least to filter out garbage that can come out).

I personally find a lot of value in black-boxing with something like an LLM and basically deconstructing - I now can write python/bash/ SQL with pretty much no assistance.

That being said people need to cross-check all output against other sources especially when you yourself dont trust what was outputted.

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Yeah but can you do it in less than a minute? I had to translate Ancient Greek last week and I spent like an hour trying to figure it out before asking the toaster who did it basically instantly. Like could I have eventually figured it out sure probably but the toaster is quicker and accurate enough for my use case.

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Dreilala@reddit

The thing is, unless copilot becomes more reliable, I have to double check every single thing it does.

So copilot moght only take a minute, but me checking will take just as long as if I had done it myself in the first place.

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The_Real_Abhorash@reddit

Do you not check your own work anyways? Because I do so that’s irrelevant and also depending on the exact usage I might not care all that much if it’s marginally inaccurate.

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XTI_duck@reddit

I’m using it to learn about Microsoft’s Power Platform. It can also do a lot of menial or tedious work very quickly, depending on licensing. I got one yesterday and I’m amazed at how much faster it runs.

I’m pretty bad at communicating through text. I tend to be very formal and wordy, the WORST combination. Copilot is exceptionally helpful for making emails concise and friendly.

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I_ride_ostriches@reddit

Which license do you have that helps with power platform?

[-]

XTI_duck@reddit

Copilot for Microsoft 365. Be careful though, the copilot branded plugins cost an ABSURD amount to use on top of the license. Coworker ran into it with power apps. Built some stuff and used the dataverse plugins. Had a HEFTY bill the next month.

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I_ride_ostriches@reddit

How much are we talking?

[-]

XTI_duck@reddit

Truthfully, I don’t remember off the top of my head. I remember laughing at the absurd number, but he could have been using a lot of them.

License pricing isn’t bad. 20/month for personal stuff, but they have enterprise licensing. Of course, I didn’t see any numbers for the AI builder plugins (shocker), but his experience was quite a while ago. Could have been years even, so pricing and what’s included have probably changed. I’m on mobile and half asleep, so too lazy to click around.

See - https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/power-platform/products/power-apps/pricing#:~:text=of%202%2C000%20licenses.-,Unlimited%20Power%20Apps%20and%20Power%20Pages%20for%20assigned%20user,Buy%20now

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I_ride_ostriches@reddit

Gotcha. I’ll check it out

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newboofgootin@reddit

For example to sound more professional

Cyber-parr0t@reddit

Sounds like an extremely negligent CEO of the concerns around safe AI usage with respect to company data. Remember all this data is stored in the cloud. What happens when you put creds in plaintext into these underdeveloped LLMs?

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Professional-Local-6@reddit

Use https://www.ibm.com/products/watsonx-code-assistant-ansible-lightspeed

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jr-416@reddit

Set up a AI server to run self hosted llms. Commercial services may not keep what's entered into them completely private. The cost of the server will probably curb his enthusiasm.

As for you, a llm may prove helpful for scripting.

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Papfox@reddit

First thing, make sure whichever AI offering you pay for is siloed or it may train from the questions your team ask it and leak proprietary code to other users outside your company. I know of at least one instance of this happening.

An easy win is to use an LLM to check out things like bash code. "What is wrong with this bash command? (paste)". I find it really handy for big commands that have embedded JSON as parameters. It's much quicker to use an LLM than to try to work out where I didn't escape or quote something correctly in a 3 line long command.

Things like "Write a bash AWSCLI command to count the number of objects in the S3 bucket s3://mybucket" is generally quicker than using RTFM. "Write a bash script to find the amount of disk space under /home/fred that is taken up by .pdf files"

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Bemteb@reddit

"Write a bash script to find the amount of disk space under /home/fred that is taken up by .pdf files"

find "$DIR" -type f -iname "*.pdf" -exec rm | awk '{print "0"}'

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sarcasmyousausage@reddit

"Write a bash script to find the amount of disk space under /home/fred that is taken up by .pdf files"

find "$DIR" -type f -iname "*.pdf" -exec rm | awk '{print "0"}'

find "$DIR" -type f -iname "*.pdf" -delete -print | awk '{print $1,0}'

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It was in our mandatory AI training. Allegedly, someone at a household name smartphone maker used AI to refine their code and it then trained from the code they feed it and suggested their proprietary code to one of their competitors as a solution to the same problem

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AnomalyNexus@reddit

I see. My (limited) understanding of LLM training is leaning towards improbable but who knows.

Got a script? Paste it and say: make it shorter! Or better! Want to change something? Let AI change it.

This week I co-wrote a dhcp server, then a PXE boot server.

Yea sure it can fuck up, but trust me: I fuck up more than AI…

Normally that takes a lot of reading, trial and error. With AI, just some minor changes…

But seriously, do you understand what a computer does “under the hood”? How a chip is designed etc? Let’s be honest: no surgeon knows how his knife was forged. Writing SQL statements is not what IT is about.

I have no idea what makes you so upset about using AI.

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Generico300@reddit

I find it most useful for writing responses to emails I don't want to answer.

Occasionally it's useful as a reference tool that I can ask a question and get a decent summary/example of some technical concept or command parameters etc. Like an improved google search.

And it's ok for writing small scripts or discrete functions that are pretty straight forward, but you still have to check it.

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Kwantem@reddit

Whatever you do, don't use real data for training!

(Gives AI a bunch of data and tells it to obfuscate)

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MBILC@reddit

Your CEO has been drinking the Koolaid sadly. GPT have their basic uses but for Infra and other related things, I have found it completely useless and so out of data for information.

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gonzojester@reddit

What are you using? I've used it to build terraform scripts for my cloud deployments.

Also used it to help build ansible scripts for other automations in my home environment.

Have you tried all of them, not just ChatGPT?

To be transparent, I am paying for the GPTs I use.

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MBILC@reddit

Co-Pilot primarily (internal company one), and it was more just basic things for hyper-converged, less around scripting. I think scripting is one area where it can really make your life easier, or at least get you going in the right direction.

I know I do really need to give others a try and work on my prompting skills...

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kingdead42@reddit

I will frequently use it for rephrasing emails I need to send out to the org.

"ChatGPT, write up a formal email for the roll-out of . Include common-use case situations of its use."

Then tweak from there.

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Valdaraak@reddit

The only real use I've found for it so far is generating job descriptions. That did save me a bunch of time last week.

Also regarding the CEO...

CEO is not some finance-focused guy that never touch a computer. He is a backend dev and coded all the core of the SaaS my company runs.

I've honestly stopped using google and going to AI to get answers.

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Windows_XP2@reddit

I've also used AI plenty of times if I wanted a quick and dirty answer to a quick question I have, rather than trying to sort through a bunch of bullshit that would take at least 20 minutes if I'm lucky.

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HoodRatThing@reddit

Nice.

Nailed it. I was going to say telling people they need to use AI is like saying they need to use a stapler. It's only useful in the right use cases.

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admiralspark@reddit

hammer

nailed it

✨AI🌈

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CeleryMan20@reddit

hammer … nailed it : this is gold! You beat me to it, take my vote.

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aes_gcm@reddit

Jim had the right idea: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=glFrp-CmNVA

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hitosama@reddit

It seems to me like everybody who is expert in some field or knows some technology in depth doesn't like AI very much because it slows them down. Yes, there seems to be general consensus that there are few areas you can delegate to AI but it won't be very specific or correct and you'll still have to do few touch-ups.

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Valdaraak@reddit

there seems to be general consensus that there are few areas you can delegate to AI but it won't be very specific or correct and you'll still have to do few touch-ups.

Nor is it consistent. Ask it the exact same query at different times and you'll get different results. In coding, that could mean it's formatted completely different than the last chunk you made so now you have to edit consistent layout.

I used Copilot last week to do some salary research for the local area. First time I asked, it gave me one number and range. When I asked the exact same thing a couple hours later, it gave me different numbers and ranges, to the tune of a $25k difference between them. I went back to just googling and going to the salary sites individually.

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ValidDuck@reddit

hen I asked the exact same thing a couple hours later, it gave me different numbers and ranges, to the tune of a $25k difference between them. I went back to just googling and going to the salary sites individually.

What was the title, market, and end number you landed on?

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ValidDuck@reddit

It seems to me like everybody who is expert in some field or knows some technology in depth doesn't like AI very much because it slows them down

I find that the only people that make such claims go to something like chatgpt expecting a perfect solution and get frustrated and write it off as useless when they are only handed 90% of the solution.

it's wildly efficient at research and summarizing information into actionable information.

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SpeculationMaster@reddit

you mean AI is going to downsize the marketing VP's team and the HR Director's team? Cant have that, AI is now banned.

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kerosene31@reddit

Replace upper management with AI :)

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Last_Painter_3979@reddit

He just discovered that he can delegate all the coding of its unit tests to some vscode plugin interfacing him with chatgpt

do those unit tests actually ... test?

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TotallyNotIT@reddit

I do quite a bit with AI in the scope of client work. ChatGPT is usually pretty rough for most things once you get past the late beginner stages of anything specific and it requires a fair bit of refinement to get anything useful.

A general purpose model like ChatGPT isn't great for doing things related to a specific knowledge domain, purpose-built models are almost always going to be better. It's like building a table using nothing but a circular saw. It's possible but you'll get better results faster by using tools more suited to different parts of that process.

I have a Power Platform dev friend who built his own model and fed it all the official docs and it's silly how useful it is for his work. There are models people are training for specific purposes but you just have to find them.

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am0x@reddit

Well Cursor will read your entire codebase and create/delete/scaffold/write files and code based on the codebase rather than the code shown to it. It really is incredible what it can do.

Just today, I used it to do something that would take 4 days in 4 hours.

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This isnt probably helpful, but this is my favorite dev perspective on AI so far

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zGBhsZHjqkU

TLDR thor of pirate software discussing how it takes an hour to write code a 15 minutes to debug, verses ai writing code in minutes and hours of debugging.

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THEoMADoPROPHET@reddit

This sounds like a classic case of 'shiny object syndrome' from the top brass. Sometimes it feels like execs jump on the latest tech trend without understanding the practical implications for the team. Maybe a discussion about actual needs and potential use cases for AI could help ground things a bit?

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i think the current AI offerings aren't as reliable as they seem at first.

Asking questions will sometimes give what appears to be a well sourced answer. only to later find out that the info is incorrect and that the sources are only tangentially related. Copilot, Chat GPT, and google Bard (i think they changed the name for this one, i haven't used it in months) all seem to have this problem. OH, the best thing is using it to write emails. Sometimes i get angry, write out an email and then run it through Chat gpt and ask it to make it more professional.

seems risky, unless everyone is on the same page that code needs to be reviewed before implementing.

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Neaj-@reddit

Sounds like a great conundrum, fwiw AI is pretty much a lot of crap when it comes to sysadmin.

Sure it can bash, awk, sed but the moment you get into out of the box stuff it seems like all it does is make stuff up

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EvilSibling@reddit

I just started a new job and they have Copilot.

So i created a script that calls some APIs for some systems I manage, it pulls a snapshot of the current state of the systems and basically dumps it to a plain english description of the state of the system, for example:

Server list:

Server1:

ip address: w.x.y.z

status: online

upgrade ready: false

server2:

ip address:

….. and so on

i include all sorts of info in the output that i would normally look for when troubleshooting a problem.

Then i upload the generated text file to copilot and i ask it all sorts of questions about the systems and it will answer based on all the info in the text file. For example, ‘User Timmy Joe cant access the shared folder \fileserver\reports, can you determine why?’ and it might reply saying ‘that server is offline, this is an unscheduled outage’ or it might say ‘Timmy Joe’s VPN isnt connected’

Saves me having to log in to each system, get the info i need, then start to go through it

The problem with this is the file you upload to copilot has to be quite small, like a couple hundred KB at most.

basically i try to use it as a junior technician, i make it do the mundane things so that I can concentrate on bigger things

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Not_your_guy_buddy42@reddit

great idea! try it with claude

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am0x@reddit

Copilot is kind of just a helper. You need to check out Cursor. I swear I could teach my 7 year old how to write a JS SDK in 1 hour that writes better code than 99% of the people I have ever worked with.

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SolidKnight@reddit

It is decent at purely creative things or giving you a starting point. You cannot trust it for anything that needs accuracy. Also keep in mind that it doesn't reason, it just predicts. A good way to demonstrate that is to ask it to count the number of R's in Strawberry. It gets it wrong because the AI doesn't actually count.

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was_fired@reddit

I never hooked it directly to any of my code, but frankly when writing IaC I've found it really useful as a starting point since I don't know all of the functions so it gives me an initial template that I can then verify, adapt, and refine. I'm sure you're past this point in your Ansible Playbooks but even, "Give me an Ansible playbook to install the latest version of Apache and update if it's already present for a rolling install across a cluster" produces something halfway decent for a novice.

Likewise if your company is okay with you putting this into OpenAI you can have it convert lists into official inventory files, give it playbooks and ask it to add comments on sections explaining it, and do similar for whatever powershell or other scripts you use to help manage your endpoints.

You definitely want a human to keep looking at it as you go, but I don't think he's crazy to push more for it since it can act as an impressive knowledge base.

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xch13fx@reddit

Use it to type your emails or make them sound more professional. Use it for menial tasks like manipulating excel data or even writing out batches of code. There is absolutely something you spend brain power and time on, that you can just prompt an AI for that and move on to something else. This doesn’t mean you need to kill yourself working harder to achieve a 2x goal. Just means you should be less stressed while accomplishing the same tasks.

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tobascodagama@reddit

Forward all e-mails from the CEO directly to ChatGPT and have it reply for you.

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SofterBones@reddit

When our (now former ceo) told us to integrate AI into our ticket system, I was thinking how hilarious it would be to make everyone talk to an AI for a few messages before the ticket would get escalated to us. The ceo in particular would've lost her shit immediately if that were to ever happen.

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You setup VIP for the CEO, every itsm platform has this feature.

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SofterBones@reddit

Again that has nothing to do with the point I was making. Of course every platform has that feature

But if she insisted on something like that being implemented, I absolutely would've made her go through the same system as everyone else to see how it really would be like for them. If she had insisted on being given special privileges, of course we would've. But again your comment doesn't have anything to do with my point

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razgriz5000@reddit

I could see it working in a few years assuming a good learning source and being integrated into monitoring and inventory systems. The amount of times I've had to tell teachers to restart their laptops because a service crashed from the laptop being on for months at a time was non-trivial.

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yaminub@reddit

Implementing this myself in a few days, but I'm a one-man department, so.

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justcbf@reddit

This is exactly what we do. The AI suggests help centre articles, then follows up a few minutes later asking if they still need help, if they select yes they get to raise a ticket.

It's lowered our ticket count per month by around 25% because the users can generally fix their own issues when they know how.

Those users that ignore it when they can fix the issue themselves just get the ticket closed with a link to the help document, unless of course it's someone on the leadership team or a challenging user.

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Huckbean24@reddit

Kind of like AT&T customer support, where it ask you for a bunch of information, only for the cs rep to ask you the same thing again, if you are lucky enough to get hold of one.

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SofterBones@reddit

I've had to go through Steam and Microsoft supports a few times, and I'm not completely hopeless with computers so usually it's a legitimate issue I've had, so I've had to escalate through a few copy paste answers to get to an actual person

Some of the things I have used AO for:

Write PowerShell scripts
Write SQL queries
Write documents/policies/specifications etc.
Interpret product documentation
Write REST API calls
Generate images for intranet
Write disciplinary letters
Find useful PowerShell and JavaScript libraries based on a description
Find useful software and hardware products based on a description

The quality of what you get out is directly related to the quality of prompts you put in. With enough thought applied to your prompt you can get directly usable, or close the usable output.

Done properly, fixing the close to usable output is much faster than not using AI and generating stuff manually.

We mostly use ChatGPT4o.

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Bigtwinkie@reddit

Would love to hear more about how you are using AI for writing documentation

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ZAFJB@reddit

I put my raw, buulet point info/notes into my prompt and ask it to generate the type of document I want, and the target audience.

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am0x@reddit

Claude is significantly better. Same with Gemini.

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Is using a form letter any less dystopian? That's what people were doing 3+ years ago.

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awhaling@reddit

Depends, many do actually browse the web.

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holdmywizardhat@reddit

Copilot has a plugin that can browse the internet, there are many other ways to feed it live data as well

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9jmp@reddit

GPT4o can also pull live data now.

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Decaf_GT@reddit

Using an AI to write a disciplinary letter sounds incredibly dystopian, btw. Yuck.

It's really not any different than using bog-standard boiler-plate corporate HR bullshit speak that we've been using for decades.

Disciplinary letters are never about giving you a warning, they're all about documenting an incident for the eventuality that you need to fire someone. It's a completely blunt, clinical, non-emotional thing, I don't see any issues using AI to craft it.

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shemp33@reddit

I had a complex scheduling task to figure out.

It was based on figuring out an interview schedule for a team of 1500 people, each of who would be in from 1 up to 4 different locations at different dates and times. And a specific person who needed to meet with each person who would only be at one location per day.

I plugged in the rules and constraints to chatgpt and it spit out a python script that:

Sucked in the xls file of the people schedule.

Analyzed the possibilities

Created a logical schedule that followed the constraints.

I couldn’t have done that as quickly on my own.

For sure, I have asked plenty of questions where I'm like "a human wouldn't understand this" and sure enough the AI doesn't either and just guestimates (which is still better than a google search which would have returned nothing at all).

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PowerShellGenius@reddit

You could use it for this - paste your post, basically verbatim, and the AI might produce an idea of how it could be used in your use case.
AI is very useful for encoding initially blunt thoughts and ideas into professional and respectful terms. If you end up finding no use for AI in managing your infrastructure, you can tell your AI the reasons none of its ideas worked, and ask it to draft a letter respectfully explaining to a somewhat (but not extremely) technical executive why AI does not fit your job.

If you do find a use for AI in your job - remember to treat AI like a stranger on the internet. Finding scripts online as starting points and ideas, and then reading them, checking docs for any commands you don't understand, is a great time saver compared to doing everything from scratch, especially if you are new at scripting.

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thewrinklyninja@reddit

I've found it handy to give me parameters for cli commands I can't remember. Give me a grip regex to get this this and this

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acoyfellow@reddit

When you’re about to do a task in the terminal… do it how you normally would.

Then ask the AI, “is there anything that I’m not thinking about in terms of security, use cases within the organization, operation optimization, automation, or anything else you can think of?”

Sometimes when I use LLMs in hindsight for tasks I uncover new information.

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Pleasant_Tooth_2488@reddit

Use AI to compose your email.

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anima-vero-quaerenti@reddit

I use it to change tone all the time.

Prompt: please respond to the following email in a polite, professional manner, explaining why it’s a stupid idea from a technical and business perspective. Limit prose and adverbs.

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fasti-au@reddit

He didn’t say what for so I guess you can request some GPUs and try build a cluster for others to inference with

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Blockchain!!

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hotmoltenlava@reddit

ChatGPT is great for writing knowledge base articles and process documents for new techs and/or users. You need to verify their accuracy, but it saves a lot of time. I built a chatbot to encourage user self resolve of basic issues, which had 100 KB articles that were sent, based on user input. It worked well and reduced tickets. This is the kind of thing your CEO will eat up.

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tomk14@reddit

This is a great use. Could you provide some more information on the chat bot you created? Also, was it based on KB articles you wrote or did it write them itself based on knowledge from the internet and your environment?

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hotmoltenlava@reddit

I’m not a fan of Zendesk, but it was purchased before I got there. Once you develop Zendesk (it took me a year), it is alright. They have an integrated chatbot builder. It is all a big if/then tree. You basically build a Visio flow and then input it into the chatbot builder. The KB articles would be suggested to users based on your stated issues, following the flow. It was actually pretty awesome. It cut down on a ton of T1 issues and tickets. I hate most chatbots, too. Mine is better than just about all I’ve seen. Zendesk corporate actually met with me to see how I did it. They were impressed. It was a fun project that made the C Suite impressed. Back to the original topic, this is how I used AI successfully.

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DmarcDuty@reddit

Fyi, this method of using AI is commonly called retrieval augmented generation (RAG). Once you get the hang of this approach, your AI gets sooo much better.

The idea is this: Instead of depending on the knowledge that ChatGPT already had, you give it the knowledge to answer your question. The prompt would be something like: “Our customer has the following question. Please answer their question based on the knowledge articles below. Here is the question: Here are the knowledge articles: ” Now ChatGPT doesn’t use its knowledge to answer the question but instead uses its knowledge for tying the info in the articles to the question to figure out which response is best.

I use it to help write emails where I need to balance professionalism and assertiveness because by myself I usually end up creating something asinine. I also use it to create job descriptions or power point slide content that I can modify to un-ai it. I don’t use it much for code but I will occasionally ask it for suggestions on project details, like best practices on something.

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Moubai@reddit

answer to some question of reddit user like you :

As a Linux sysadmin with 15 years of professional experience, I understand your concerns about the CEO's directive to use AI to increase coding productivity. Here are a few suggestions on how you can approach this situation:

Evaluate the AI tools: Research and evaluate the AI tools that are available for sysadmin and coding tasks. Assess their capabilities, limitations, and potential impact on your workflow. This will help you make an informed decision about which tools to use and how to integrate them effectively.
Assess the impact on your work: Analyze how the use of AI tools might affect your daily tasks, job responsibilities, and the overall team dynamics. Identify potential challenges, such as the need for additional training, changes in workflow, or potential security risks.
Communicate with the CEO: Schedule a meeting with the CEO to discuss your concerns and provide your professional perspective. Highlight the importance of maintaining a balance between human expertise and AI-powered tools. Suggest a gradual and controlled implementation approach to ensure a smooth transition.
Propose a pilot project: Suggest a pilot project where you can test the AI tools in a controlled environment, evaluate their performance, and gather feedback from the team. This will help you demonstrate the benefits and limitations of the AI tools, and provide a basis for a more informed decision-making process.
Develop a training plan: If the CEO decides to move forward with the AI implementation, work with the team to develop a comprehensive training plan. Ensure that everyone, including yourself, is equipped with the necessary skills to effectively utilize the AI tools and integrate them into your existing workflows.
Continuously monitor and adapt: Once the AI tools are in use, closely monitor their performance, identify areas for improvement, and be prepared to adapt your processes and workflows as needed. Maintain open communication with the CEO and the team to address any concerns or challenges that arise.

Remember, as an experienced sysadmin, your expertise and understanding of the technical landscape are invaluable. By proactively engaging with the CEO and proposing a thoughtful approach, you can help ensure that the integration of AI tools enhances your team's productivity and efficiency without compromising the quality of your work.

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toyberg90@reddit

I got 10 hours a week dedicated to "learning AI". There were no specifics, just learn AI. Even if there is no actual use case right now we believe it's either learn now or pay very expensive service fees in the future. Soon there will be no way around AI and you either are prepared and used good data structure for some time already or you will be forced to let Microsoft or even worse companies handle all of this for you.

So I started learning. First the hardware and everything that comes with it. Buying some of it as well. Then started to update our internal documentation to be easier to use and ingest with AI. Learned about security layers inbetween data and AI.

Next is to learn how to secure the user interface in a way, so the AI only reveals the knowledge that the person using it is allowed to know. There will be tons of stuff more to come. We have no endgoal here and don't utilize AI otherwise in the daily business for now.

But we will be able to understand how it works, what is needed and in the best case scenario we will be able to run, support and troubleshoot it locally when the time of obligatory use of AI will hit our industry (civil engineering and architects).

So yeah, as a sysadmin I don't have a real use case today apart from getting the skills and knowledge to hopefully have an easier transition in the future.

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dpf81nz@reddit

its useful for writing scripts, even if its not 100% its good for building the bones of it and then tweaking to suit your needs

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Amareisdk@reddit

Talk to your colleagues about it.

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Proper-Obligation-97@reddit

The way you describe what the CEO does, it that AI is just a helper. You as a linux sysadmin using Ansible, you could potentially do the same.

_samux_@reddit

Ai to search in your documentation and code

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deadpanda2@reddit

I’m using copilot to finish the long yamls faster for me, and chatgpt to make script skeleton based on my ideas. So he is giving me examples and then I’m fine-tuning

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voluspa90@reddit

It's all well and good until he gets the call saying, I accidentally uploaded the source code to chatgpt... sideeyes Samsung

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gregsting@reddit

Maybe you should ask that question to chat GPT /s

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solar-gorilla@reddit

Enterprise AI implementation is so much larger than just using the tools. Where is the governance? What about AI policy and security framework?

Co-Pilot is an easy win for MS environments to help with Excel, etc. What do you want LLM’s to access? Will the LLM be trained on enterprise data? What data? Databrick’s has a decent solution for BI and finance but the solution doesn’t answer these larger fundamental questions.

I would start with the question of “what does the business need?” Not what does IT need or what does the CEO want. Google’s SAIF framework can provide a starting point for your own Enterprise AI implementation.

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HTDutchy_NL@reddit

I'm baffled that the CEO is allowing everyone to dump the codebase into third party AI tools and possibly create garbage code or allow sneaky vulnerabilities. While you aren't even allowed to implement to implement modern automation!

I guess your deployment process is putting a package on a USB drive, plugging into the deployment machine and rsyncing to each server?

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singularitittay@reddit

Your Ansible can become much more documented, much more concise, many more true idempotent cases handled. If it's leverage don't look for the CAT heavy machinery to do it all. If AI is an accelerant, use it as such.

For example, a CI Job that takes merges to main and runs documentation for a directory, then PRs. Even if it doesn't work as you want it, spend the next 50 merges improving it.

BlackSquirrel05@reddit

Usually things to look up or "create me a script that does the following."

Usually helps to have specifics.

AI is just a power tool for what you already do wit ha hammer or screwdriver.

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am0x@reddit

Exactly. I took our SOW and threw way too much information into our AI, and it actually wrote a way better solution than if I just told it to, "Write a JS SDK that connects various platforms to the SupaBase SDK"

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kingpcgeek@reddit

ChatGPT has helped me write SQL queries I would have never been able to do. I had one last week that kept giving me an error. It would change the query a bit but still give the error. I posted the same request in CoPilot, and it gave me a flawless query. Gemini has been worthless for anything I have asked of it.

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am0x@reddit

Oh really? I have found Claude to be the best, Gemini second, and ChatGPT at best 3rd. ChatGPT for coding never seems to do what I need.

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am0x@reddit

All I have to say is that I started using Cursor AI with Composer this week and today I did 4 days of work in about 4 hours. It really is the shit.

Scaffolded the project, created the files, wrote the basics, setup my env and my rollup pack, etc. I had a perfectly good working demo of an SDK in 30 mins. Now, you have to know what to write in the prompts and review/accept the code, but it saved literally days of development. And I am honestly flabbergasted by the code quality. It is better than 99% of what I see from internal devs and contractors.

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Tilt23Degrees@reddit

I gotta be honest with you, if you haven’t figured out by now how to leverage AI you’re in huge trouble.

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Like someone else mentioned, give Ansible Lightspeed a try. The architects and developers behind it are great people to talk to about improvements and how to work with it, and it can both generate starting playbooks for a task and generate things in-line while writing.

Like all these new "AI", it has a lot of shortcomings and cannot do the full job, but with some experience it can speed up writing playbooks. At least this one is created and tuned specifically to write Ansible, by IBM and RedHat.

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thomsomc@reddit

Auditor/Compliance guy here - you should use AI to document all of the things that jerks like me are always demanding. AI is really good at generating written content like policies, procedure outlines, and I bet it would be really good at assisting in producing configuration documentation. Some of the nicer services can even generate visual content, like data flow diagrams or process charts, and even a head start on some of that kind of content can go a long way.

Another amazing use case I've been taking advantage of lately is document review - you can basically feed documents that currently exist (manuals, contracts, vendor presentations, etc.) and ask the AI to summarize, find info and return location, and restructure into new formats. It's been amazing at finding clauses in contracts, like, "does this contract specify that the vendor will ensure all personnel receive cybersecurity training?"

Make sure that if anything you're doing is sensitive in nature (e.g. secure configs, private VLAN info, creds, etc.) that you use your company's private AI and not a publicly available one.

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TheTapirWhisperer@reddit

It writes all my powershell scripts.

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jholden0@reddit

I have yet to receive a useable powershell script from chatgpt. I've only tried a handful of times admittedly, but none have been useable without major modifications.

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Sportsfun4all@reddit

Every CEO wants to use AI because they think it can replace employees and cut costs to hit their bottom line so they can buy another vacation home.

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I use it to change the tone of my communications from “asshole that wishes you all would die” to “Mr Rogers”.

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CTRL1@reddit

Good change and QA practice involves primary trusted source or reference material (vendor documentation or sme/senior). IE a change must be reviewed and using a untrusted source would be required to involve an additional peer review above normal.

The concern should be given to the director or management that using AI without a process will inherently increase service impacts or additional work. It's like googling a problem and blindly implementing it.

"The webservers is throwing some errors in the logs" "AI: reboot the machine" Management: "why did all of our sites just go down" Worker: "AI told me to"

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Buddy_Kryyst@reddit

Just ask the AI what you can use it for.

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Guru_Meditation_No@reddit

AIs are good for reading and responding to emails from the CEO.

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lampishthing@reddit

Chatbot for help desk tickets.

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sanitarypth@reddit

My dude, I have a project for you- For $2000 you can get a nice little Lenovo tower with a nice GPU. Check that the GPU has a high CUDA score. Install Linux, get the proprietary drivers working. Install Docker and the following containers: Ollama and Open-webUI. Make sure you are passing GPU to containers. Now you can restrict access to the gateway to prevent data spilling to the internet. I’m running llama3.1:8b and Llava-llama3 for my workloads. I run a cronjob daily to restart my containers.

I build playbooks and bash scripts with it. I can also use it with RAG of our knowledge base. I’ve been converting confluence articles into two column tables and feeding that to the model. I also can run scans through OCR then us AI to pull summaries.

Reach out if you need some help.

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definitive_solutions@reddit

You can try using it for building an internal tool to help you further automatize stuff. For example, I'm a backend guy and ChatGPT is a nice "frontend coworker" to make a couple of web UIs here and there for my sysadmin needs. I could do it but I loathe frontend and dude's actually good enough for some basic stuff. Doesn't even need to be pretty. It'd have been uglier if I'd have done it myself.

Other than that, it's like other people said, you pick the tool for the job, not a job for the tool

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ButtThunder@reddit

Excel formulas, figuring out compliance requirements, quick powershell scripts, regex, legal advice, interview questions, grammar checks, email professionalism checks.

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dingerz@reddit

OP have you posed your questions to a LLM?

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RichardJimmy48@reddit

I honestly don't find AI in its current form to be useful for anything beyond assembling and regurgitating code snippets it finds from GitHub, which isn't particularly useful for me. If I want it to code me tic tac toe, I can be reasonably confident it will get that task done for me, but nobody is paying me for that. Anything more sophisticated than that, I really can't trust it with with anything. When you try pushing the AI to find the limits, it breaks fast and hard. It really just feels like a gimmick. When you ask it to do something you can find 25,000 unoriginal examples of on Google, sure, it APPEARS smart. Give it something even slightly original or vaguely complex, and it will immediately fall on its face.

As a test, I asked it to make a Python program that will find "numbers that look like words" and gave it the example of 808 looking like "BOB". What it ended up doing was creating a mapping of the numbers 0-9 to different letters, which for all of 10 seconds seems like its onto the right track. But then it hard-coded the word "BOB" as the search target, and started looping from 0 to 10,000, mapping each digit in the number to letters, and comparing it to see if it matched "BOB". If you want to interpret the problem as "I put in a word and you give me a number that looks like the word", then its solution is ridiculously sub-optimal; It could have just reversed the mapping around and checked to see if each letter in the word was in the mapping. If you want to interpret the problem as "Loop over numbers from 0 to N and see if you can find ones that look like words", it delivered a solution that's at best about 10 percent complete. Having it manage infrastructure is going to be so many orders of magnitude more complicated than writing some dumb shitty python script you would make in a 'my first programming class', and even trying to have it generate a simple Ansible playbook as a starting point is usually not worth the effort. If it's gonna spit out 10 tasks using the shell module to do something that there's a built in module for, I'm not going to waste my time 'bootstrapping' with it.

Future generations of AI might perform a lot better, but right now it's just a gimmick. People are too persuaded by the idea of replacing 10 employees who earn six-figures with one employee supervising a bunch of AI processes to come back down to reality.

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HeightApprehensive38@reddit

You can use to for things like ansible playbooks and terraform for managing infra. I made a tool that helps with ansible. Check out my vid https://youtu.be/auYgSJF5dCU?si=GDEl-onmRczkiA2D GitHub link is in the description.

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Godcry55@reddit

Meh, it’s good at writing code if you prompt it well but you have to fix a lot of the logic before you run it.

Just use it to generate pornographic photos of Greta Thunberg.

That's the only thing I've seen the people on Facebook use it for.

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alwyn@reddit

Dear AI, teach me to become the bastard system operator from hell.

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RubyKong@reddit

AI does not "create" in any real sense of the word - all it can do is mish-max existing code snippets things together.

If you're asking AI to create the next "Windows" or "google" or "facebook" yeah nah it doesn't "create".

I use it like a more efficient google - gives me easier / faster "answers" than going through a bunch of search results. Uncovers API calls to libraries that I am not familiar with.

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krokodil2000@reddit

Five leading root causes of the failure of AI projects were identified

First, industry stakeholders often misunderstand — or miscommunicate — what problem needs to be solved using AI.
Second, many AI projects fail because the organization lacks the necessary data to adequately train an effective AI model.
Third, in some cases, AI projects fail because the organization focuses more on using the latest and greatest technology than on solving real problems for their intended users.
Fourth, organizations might not have adequate infrastructure to manage their data and deploy completed AI models, which increases the likelihood of project failure.
Finally, in some cases, AI projects fail because the technology is applied to problems that are too difficult for AI to solve.

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Huckbean24@reddit

So you are saying it is useless.

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elias_99999@reddit

I use it perplexity for certain things, mostly Python coding, some number crunching and some info here and there.

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ItothemuthufuknP@reddit

I had the same problem, in another area.

I asked AI how it could help me be more efficient and it started the ball rolling for me.

Try asking it how it could help you as a sysadmin.

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HowDidFoodGetInHere@reddit

It can proofread and spot mistakes pretty well. Also, it can explain concepts in pretty short order. For example:

"Hey, chatgpt.. I need to know more about X. Can you explain it in a way a complete beginner would understand and answer any specific questions I might have later?"

Chatgpt answers all the dumb questions I used to ask people that made me afraid to ask people questions.

Also, don't use it to write your emails for you.

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my_fourth_redditacct@reddit

I've been using Perplexity.ai lately, and found it very useful. It's less of a content-generation chatbot, and more of a search result aggregator. It's great for looking up documentation without having to crawl through the SEO dreck and sponsored content that Google gives you. Plus, it cites its sources so you can fact check it and read more about the results.

So far, I've used it to:

Find specific product specs

find obscure CLI commands

input error messages to find troubleshooting steps.

Here's an example of what that looks like.

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pdp10@reddit

A veteran SA should be coding, and your CEO has been actively using it to help code. On the spectrum of requests, you should see this is a fairly easy ask.

Ask your CEO if they have time to do a quick class/demo. Have some code and some docs ready to go. Try to do some experiments where you ask the LLM to refactor your Ansible code, where you ask it to turn your text docs into some code, where you ask it to translate Chef code into Ansible or Python into Go.
Which service is your CEO endorsing for code? We haven't been trialing anything yet, but I think we're going to start with some open-ended refactoring requests and see what we can get.
Write some policy for use of these services, with an eye toward the legal aspects of copyright, patent, trademark, etc.

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Huckbean24@reddit

Then immediately push the AI code into production. No need for testing.

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SpaceGuy1968@reddit

I have it come up with "starter scripts"

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teamhog@reddit

You’re asking us? Ask AI.

Pass the 1st assignment.

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GeneMoody-Action1@reddit

If they are going to leave AI up to interpretation, and just assuming AI -> Artificial Intelligence, hire a PFY to run cable, call it a day...

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Vegetable-Struggle30@reddit

I think all CEOs got a message from the Grand Wizard of CEOs that told them they need to start talking about AI, because every medium to large business is going through this right now it seems. I got appointed as some "IT" liaison for AI and all I could find was reasons why it's stupid that we're even spending time meeting about it.

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ProfessionalAd3026@reddit

In your context: shell scripts by mainly describing what it should do in comments or explanation of code I wrote stored in comments.

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frogmicky@reddit

You can have it write a cover letter and a resume so you can escape your kool aid drinking boss lol.

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Iced__t@reddit

He is a backend dev and coded all the core of the SaaS my company runs.

I have seen "CEO devs" before and it NEVER ends well.

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Cley_Faye@reddit

AI is good for documentation index (not those that only summarize, but those that pulls reference to actual source files). For development, small models are pretty decent at completing one-two lines, or minor formatting things.

Full-on "content generation" stuff feels completely useless if you want quality; you'd have to spend a lot of time on the outputs to make sure they're acceptable.

We currently use (with a very small team) tabbyml for code, and are looking into gpt4all and similar tool for arranging documents. All local/self-hosted for obvious reasons.

Using a third party "AI" service is a big no-no. While we do depend in licensing terms in some places ourselves, sending *everything* to a third party with a pinky promise to not be nefarious still does not sound like a good idea.

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blu-base@reddit

That's sounds great! I need to try this too.

Regarding the topic, I use generative services to add inline documentation comments for scripts and infrastructure code when I don't have time or interest . It gets code commented enough in many of my cases; or far enough that I only have to review and edit for the (internal) release

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TimTimmaeh@reddit

Three things that come to my mind:

1) I’m sure there are a few Automations that have issues or needs to be (re)created. If not, think about Baseline Runs, Monitoring enhancements or regression testing.

2) Your documentation is all set? Perhaps give it a shot with help of AI.

3) Some smart license management to reduce costs with help of AI might impress your CEO..

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nullbyte420@reddit

Use it to analyze logs and such. Automate troubleshooting and have it provide suggestions for remediations.

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GermanK20@reddit

Have asked AI what to use AI for? Make sure you get a 1 or 2 page answer and return it to management as your own ideas :)

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ass-holes@reddit

Company here in Belgium put everyone on a four day work week with five day pay. Fifth day is done by AI. Everyone and I mean everyone is getting one day back per week.

They're a well know software company in my country so I GUESS they know what they're doing.

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StackerCoding@reddit

This is such a boomer take tbh, I also thought AI was useless, I was the last on my team to actually adopt it on my workflow, and I felt very stupid when I finally did because I should have started way sooner.

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ScaredyCatUK@reddit

Use it for replying to the CEO's emails.

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tecedu@reddit

I have used it quite often to just access paywalled documentation. The best use of AI or LLM in this case is to break down everything into simple parts or functions. All of my prompts are never longer than a function, the other day I asked it to write a python context manager for temporaraily removing proxy variables, was it very simple thing I could do? Sure but I saved like 4 minuutes off my time.

I do not trust it for linux commands tho, it is kinda comically bad for linux, it is great for powershell. If he wants the devs and the company to use it then why not? One of the best thing we have from copilot is automatically writing detailed PR descriptions, and you can ask it so scan your repos and it will learn from your code and will git blame kinda effectively xD; if you write bad code it also makes it signifincantly worse.

TLDR: AI for Dev code yes, AI for Powershell yes, AI for text and summarising yes, AI for Linux commands HELL NO.

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planedrop@reddit

Your CEO has no idea what he is doing and is just using buzzwords to .......

"CEO is not some finance-focused guy that never touch a computer. He is a backend dev and coded all the core of the SaaS my company runs."

Oh nvm.... lol

AI/ML stuff can get you a good starting point on a lot of things, so it may make sense to go this direction. I will say some devs claim that the code isn't good enough and takes more time to debug etc.... and I am NOT some big dev, so I can't really speak to what side of that is true, but I've heard both things extensively.

Not sure you, as a sysadmin, have that much to do w/ it though if you aren't directly a developer.

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drashna@reddit

I mean, have the AI work on your resume.

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numblock699@reddit

ChatGPT will be able to assist you alot. The code interpreter and similar GPTs can be awesome and a time saver.

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Frequent_Simple5264@reddit

Your CEO is finance focused & never touch a computer, but he still somehow is a backend dev and coded all the core your company runs on????

I assume in your personal work you use/create some scripts? If so, try using LLMs to help you with writing scripts. My experience is that they (LLM) are very good at generating decent code. Yes, you still need to fix & fine tune it, but you save a lot of time as you just need to give instructions to LLM and it will give you a good starting point.

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pomyh@reddit

CEO is not some finance-focused guy that never touch a computer

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Log analysis.

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blackbeardaegis@reddit

Just make some shit up they don't know the difference.

The whole deal is a mess.

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crazzzme@reddit

I use a tool called shell_gpt pretty regularly for rearing man pages and for helping generate shell commands

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greatbritain813@reddit

Create something instead with Python. That’s really all AI is.

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batmonkey7@reddit

Only an idiot CEO would do this... you can't claim intellectual property rights over code generated by AI.

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Teeklin@reddit

If you have a company financed AI account with actual SLA for privacy you can do some simple maintenance things with it pretty nicely.

Upload some of your code and tell it to document any bugs or flaws it finds. Have it go through your code and add comments about what is doing what so future devs can follow along or troubleshoot more easily. Ask if there are any more efficient ways of doing X or Y and to show you how.

It's also a great baseline for just starting a script on something. Tell it what you want it to do and in what language and then at that point a lot of the grunt typing is done and you just need to plug in variables or tweak some incorrect stuff.

Can also use it to help generate documentation for things you're doing or give you best practices in something new that you're not super familiar with.

It's just a tool like any other but it's very versatile and can simply save a lot of Google and research time if you're working with popular languages.

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idiopathicpain@reddit

i have it write script for me.

i pass it wiki documentatino and then have it build splunk queries

or customize an apache config

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luthan@reddit

What you could do is setup RAG, load up a bunch of your documentation items in there, and use some LLM for contextual search of your documentation database. That would actually be useful if you guys have good and thorough docs.

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whitehatMurlock@reddit

I don’t know if this has been said or not, but do you use a ticketing or kanban system for sprints? When you use tools like ansible or anything else, how do you document the code, changes, updates, etc.?

I use ChatGPT to help with the following:

I’ve actually used it to help develop python code for automating access provisioning and de-provisioning
Used it for automation to pull down cloud inventory assets and their json configurations, running it through various security tools, and exporting any potential misconfigurations. All of the code was developed solely using ChatGPT (I used it to create the concept, provide architecture/service recommendations, architecture diagrams, and dataflow diagrams, etc.). This uses python, and before this my only knowledge with python was reading code to look for vulnerabilities.. I had never used or developed code with python previously (mainly used powershell, bat and bash).
I’ve used ChatGPT to help me create SOP templates, cloud formation templates, terraform templates, etc
Have also used it to create templates for tickets
Used it to create PowerPoint slides and metrics

I think you can use it for lots of things as long as you spot check it for when it hallucinates or gives garbage to you. Hope this helps.

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pdoten@reddit

A lot of people forget that AI also include machine learning. Fire up Elasticsearch, get a ML license, point your logs to it, let it learn the steady state and then it will know anomalies. It will proactively look for things going sideways in your systems.

Alternatively, you can roll your own ML.
I am doing self hosted python based anomaly detection for multiple project. The results of these could be thrown in a gen AI for help in solving issues. You could even self host the gen AI to airgap the internal PI from flowing out....

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I use copilot pro. I use it to help rewrite tech docs that were put in word documents and convert them to markdown format.

Create starting points of scripts. Search for stuff. I hardly use google anymore.

Man pretty much everything tbh. I feel crippled without it now.

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nirodhie@reddit

Use it to Create bash scripts and automate everything

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rguerraf@reddit

Let AI do the photos for the website

Tx_Drewdad@reddit

Yeah, but the CEO doesn't have to know that.

Is this the strategy: 1. Get AI 2. ??? 3. Profit

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chicaneuk@reddit

Seems to be the direction for most senior leadership in organisations these days.

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InvaderOfTech@reddit

I used it to build a new resume...

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chicaneuk@reddit

There is some utterly shit senior leadership out there, is my current take on things.

ValidDuck@reddit

ceo.... he can delegate all the coding of its unit tests

I'm a fan of using the new language models where it makkes sense... ChatGPT is a wonderful rubber duck and it can write mostly accurate scripts for simple tasks much faster than i can.

chatgpt could help you fill a lot of gaps in your ansible playbooks.

this kind of rules because ISO12345

iso27001? anyways... brush up your resume. A CEO writing unit tests AND micromanaging to this level is a red flag.

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gex80@reddit

Do you have to prove that you are using AI? If you do not have to prove it, then ignore it.

Otherwise, it's only use is to start scripts that you finalize yourself for your environment or for a boiler plate documentation starting point.

There are Ops AI products but they are expensive and do not have the insight to take action without human approval.

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GreekNord@reddit

It's great for validating dynamic group rules, scripts, firewall rules, etc.

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kulshan@reddit

Have an AI bot attend all your meetings for you!

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Connection-Terrible@reddit

It’s been super handy for making scripts where I’m unfamiliar with an api or a library (pysimplegui). I also use it when I forget basic concepts in coding. Google is so useless these days.

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doll-haus@reddit

AI chatbot to handle incoming requests and ticket generation?

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jailh@reddit

never touch a computer. He is a backend dev and coded all the core of the SaaS my company runs. He still codes when he is not with prospects or client, etc. so he is not out of touch with the overall tech

Chose a version of this reality :-)

Sample prompt that ChatGPT answers perfectly, unlike most peoplem or faster :

Write an AWK command that works on a comma-separated CSV file. Actions: replace X with Y in the 2nd and 5th fields, put field 7 in lowercase, and output fields 3, 2, 5, and 7, with a pipe as a separator.
Change this SQL Request to add
Regarding this SQL Schema, write 500 sample records (with an insert statement for each one).

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pomyh@reddit

CEO is not some finance-focused guy that never touch a computer

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jailh@reddit

Oops :)

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Wolfram_And_Hart@reddit

I’d have it write all my emails and communications. I can do the rest of my job by hand.

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PsneakyPseudonym@reddit

Use it to write your orgs policies and procedures.

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SilentGhosty@reddit

Ansible lightspeed helped me for simple tasks or examples where i‘m to lazy to look up.

Mainly i feel like ai is 2x more work. Cause you have to verify the code. And everything complex is just garbage

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shutchomouf@reddit

I would suggest starting with optimization of your current code, have AI look at it and look for improvements. secondly, offload all documentation to the AI with you as final editor.

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snorkel42@reddit

Use AI to write an email to your CEO encouraging him to put the kool aid down.

Training ML models on prior data sets in order to automate or monitor the same tasks going forward is extremely useful. For example in a cybersecurity setting, training models to look for certain suspicious activity and then having an alert generate when it finds similar-enough new activity is extremely useful. AWS SageMaker is a powerful tool for this kind of thing.

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TechCF@reddit

Do github copilot. As an intellisense type auto complete tool, and a rubber duck. It is a great partner to run things by unless on very modern libraries /tech.

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ohzir@reddit

There are a lot of great suggestions on how to start using it. All I have to add is that you should really consider this to be a mandate of "learning to use the new wrench." You do not want to be the guy holding a rock in a year.

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jake04-20@reddit

Is he asking for specific deliverables or just expecting you to use AI in some regard? I use AI daily. Everything from stupid personal questions, to entertain myself, or for serious work related questions.

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Master-IT-All@reddit

I utilize AI in the following ways;

Research topics I am familiar with but might not have details. I'll ask GPT about a PowerShell script to do specific tasks, like how do I download this REST report from MS365.
Documentation, presales, service description, anything that is basic and doesn't involve asking GPT to be creative. Avoid creative tasks for AI, my experience is that is when it hallucinates the most.

As your CEO how can we trust AI when every model cannot correctly tell you the number of "r"s in the word "strawberry"?

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person_8958@reddit

I'm also a Linux sysadmin, and I use AI all the time.

That being said, I think the 2x time savings claim is wildly optimistic.

Yes, it does help me recall syntax for scripting languages I haven't written in years. But if you copy paste what it shits out and try to run it, you're insane. Anything over 20 lines takes more time to edit/refactor AI horseshit than it would to write from scratch. You absolutely cannot trust what AI gives you. This is a problem that has been getting steadily worse as LLMs begin to suffer from overtraining (eating their own horseshit over and over again)

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blockplanner@reddit

I use chatgpt all the time. Chatgpt is a better reference for almost every API I use than their actual reference documents are. It can often write complete scripts, or functions that work exactly how I want.

But it only does the coding part, it basically hands you the sort of code you might write without having tested it at all, and can fail spectacularly.

I've been looking for an easy log analysis tool that uses AI/ML to find anomalies. I've tried a few but haven't seen anything that have impressed me. That would probably be a pretty ideal use for what your CEO is after.

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nbs-of-74@reddit

Who owns the code AI produces? Who owns the information or code provided by the developers?

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Jswazy@reddit

Ai writes a lot of my ansible playbooks these days.

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Sokmans@reddit

Implement ai system monitoring with manage engine or something

If you have the money for it and stuff :)

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auriem@reddit

I use it to make networking haikus...

Packets trace their path,

Silent whispers through the wires—

Web of light connects.

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FauxReal@reddit

Feed your question into an AI and tell it what your job is and then ask how to make use of it in your wor.

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machstem@reddit

Start by self hosting your own llm and ask him.to budget in a bunch of 4090 so you have CUDA cores and 24gb of vram to work with

You could run a small ollama+openwebgui and have it interact with an SD instance for things but I can't see that being useful for devs aside from maybe front end stuff

You can use the llm to autocomplete things you don't wanna copy/paste or have to remember how to do. You can train it on various guides and use the larger llm models to help you validate things, edit typos, make general summaries of your code, helping you find errors

I don't recommend exposing it online when possible

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Your ceo was bad at coding if he's 2x faster is my hot take

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sysadmin189@reddit

I use it to create stupid short stories while I wait for automation to run.

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extreme4all@reddit

My process with AI is fairly simple, i make something than desctibe the task, provide what i made and ask "as a professional , think through this step by step how you would imprpve this. Works fairly well, usually gives actual decent improvements, keeps 99% what i did.

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ersentenza@reddit

with my coworker, we manage \~100 linux VMs and some pfsense. That's all the infra supporting the SaaS and all the internal tooling, plus all the IT (\~80% mac, \~15% linux, 1 windows for the "cyberexpert" guy), you get the picture.

If you have a SaaS platform with a hundred VMs you will also have a ton of logs. Analyzing tons of logs for things gone wrong is just the kind of job you can give to an AI - see, Copilot for Security (warning: it costs a fortune)

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litui@reddit

Use it to write your OKRs.

Former Manager

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SurfaceOfTheMoon@reddit

I have found AI code generation unreliable as it makes up cmdlets or parameters. So I use AI to add comments to the scripts I write. It seems to do this very well.

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shooto_style@reddit

I use it for emails. Apparently I sound disinterested and passive aggressive

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Active-Vegetable2313@reddit

how are you in tech and have no idea how you can use AI to automate some of your work?

do you not play around with new tech? chatgpt has been out for a while

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Shining_prox@reddit

Generate scripts with it to create an army of small automation that do marvelous things

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neoreeps@reddit

AnythingLLM, works great for a lot of use cases. vim copilot, I don't write scripts anymore, I write comments. I use obsidian with AI plugin so I can interact with my notes. As a Linux sysadmin, I would expect you to know how to use AI to increase your efficiency.

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v-irtual@reddit

Grab meeting transcripts and have it summarize the meetings for you.

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CeC-P@reddit

Reallly?

"Hey I need" bam... AI can probably triage 90 percent of requests. It doesn't have to solve them necessarily, but it can at least do the initial conversation and fact gathering. Granted I HATE AI instead of support but it is useful.

On the other hand just make the AI respond to the CEO's emails... problem solved.

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ibeechu@reddit

Time to retire. Enshittification has infected the CEO.

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zeezero@reddit

You're exec is weird asking for random increase in AI use.
However, I think it's also weird that you have no clue how you could possibly leverage it in your day to day.

AI knows pfsense. AI knows linux. AI knows ansible. AI knows many things.

Do you ever have questions on how to perform any operations on those platforms? Then ask the AI and see what it's response is.

Or was your expectation that AI is going to run your operation or configure your systems for you?

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KoalaOfTheApocalypse@reddit

Does he not know that AI makes frequent mistakes and frequently spits out nonsense code? I use copilot for powershell and bash scripting a lot, and more often than not I have to test and tweak and ask copilot multiple times in different ways. It gives me a great base to start with, but rarely can I just use what it spits out as-is.

It's a good helper, but not a suitable human replacement yet.

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thomasmitschke@reddit

Let it do you work :)

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DependentVegetable@reddit

I find it very helpful for "grunt work" like writing unit tests and the like. Its particularly helpful for a problem where I cant quite think of the solution, but when I see it I recognize it.... And the better I can articulate the prompts because I have a good formulation of the problem the better. But if your problem is vague and you cant ELI5 to someone, LLMs are not that great. Where it can also go off the rails are for esoteric problems that it didnt have a lot of data to be trained on. It will often give you very confident answers which are flat out wrong. The analogy I like is, "treat it like an intern"... You will never blindly accept work from them, but they can be useful with some cycles of your time for supervision.

As for 2x faster ? I dunno. In my work life its for sure a tool in the toolshed. But sometimes it does waste time as well. Still a net positive in the end I think. Good luck!

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overlydelicioustea@reddit

especially for scripting i find it tremendously useful.

Not that I could do most stuff myself, but simply for getting inspriation. Throw it a problem and see what it comes up with. It can be very elegant at coding.

You also might discover techniques you werent aware off.

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Individual-Teach7256@reddit

Use Ai to write him an email explaining how Ai is a stupid buzzword that non techies get all stiff in the pants when they hear it.

This encouraging to use Ai thing reminds me of buying tools without a direct need.

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zandadoum@reddit

Go to chatgpt, type “how to be a better CEO and not some bandwagon idiot” and send the results to your CEO

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ArchusKanzaki@reddit

Github Copilot Chat is fairly good at helping to explain codes when someone gave you things without documentation. Github Copilot by itself is also pretty good at either creating starting points for codes (just type what you want in comment section), and pretty good at completing your codes. For me personally, it’s very good at duplicating my Terraform codes with proper parameter and everything.

As for you, just say that it helps your research when creating automation scripts or specific commands to do something.

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Send him this study and ask if it's really helping...

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darkodo@reddit

I use it a lot to:

help with documentation boiler plate presentations Python scripting Image generation Ask how to do something I don't understand

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JonMiller724@reddit

It’s better than google.

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Smooth-Zucchini4923@reddit

I find that it's strong at tasks which are easy to check but hard to code.

For example, I found that ChatGPT is reasonably good at reading a Python/NumPy function and finding the derivative/jacobian of that function, using multidimensional calculus. This can be experimentally checked by numerically differentiating this function and seeing if the numerical answer and AI answer agree to ~8 decimal places.

So you're looking for problems which lie at the intersection of three things: easy to state, hard to solve, and easy to check.

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EscapeFacebook@reddit

Grammar, haha

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DasPelzi@reddit

Use AI to write proposals why you need to spend XXX thousand on new ~~Toys~~ Hardware.

Propose an AI-powered humanoid robot that can serve you food and drinks. No one wants to spend time to brew coffee when you can use the time to be productive.

A new Nvidia Blackwell GPU cluster to run the latest LLM models on prem. or at lease new NVIDIA RTX-Powered AI Workstations.

One AI Model is not enough, there might me to manny errors. For e.g. Servicedesk you need to run at leaset Zendesk, Chatfuel AI, Fin, Tidio, Freddy AI and Kustomer IQ.

No one want's to pay all of the subscriptions so you need to run everything on prem.

All questtions/requests need to be diected to ALL the AI Models, another set of AI models need to be used to summarize the outputs of course. No one can otherwise follow all the answers from 6 or mode AI models.

Summarization can be done with Jasper, QuillBot, Notta, Phrase, Paraphrase, Scholarcy, Smoden, Summary generator, Writesonic, etc.

when you have allm your summarized answers, you need to make descisions. Wich Answer(s) or Summaries to follow? For decision making you can tun

CustumerPersona AI, FeaturPrioritizer, MarketMinder AI DecisionEngin AI.....

supercamlabs@reddit

Uh Oh, the old "CEO found out technology does something, and is forcing everyone to fall in line email" we'll see how long this goes...until somebody makes the critical error...

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XanII@reddit

Is it a 'eager junior coder'. Treat is as such.

Dont forget the 4 eyes principle when checking the end result.

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It’s all about promoting, also it’s pretty good at creating documentation.

It does get a little confused about making ansible playbooks but it will do pretty well for most basic throw away tasks.

Like ask it “using best practices, write me an ansible playbook that patches xyz servers”

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waxwayne@reddit

You could have used AI to write this post OP. But seriously it’s like having a English major as your personal secretary.

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spyderking71@reddit

I am finding it a great tool. It has helped me brain storm responses to emails that I normally would have shot a quick response. I have automated a lot of repetitive crap, mainly in old VBA(I know old right). I have filled in gaps in documentation and project plans. I have used it to help plan out trips and other personal goals. I am currently using it to help my team think through some troubleshooting issues, identifying why a configuration might be a bad idea and some other activities. The idea is to experiment and I mean experiment with it. The prompt is not a Google input box and you can actually discuss the topic. Anyway. My two cents. Note that you also have to know and be willing to accept the BS answers and hallucinations that come out of it. Not everyone wants it, I know. It has made an impact on what and how I do my work on the daily.

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IfxT16@reddit

Shoot the magic bullet at everything. Maybe your boss hits something. /s

Say you have a brain and that is the reason he hired you. If not, then you should question your job description.

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Familiar_While2900@reddit

I use it to help rewrite shitty emails because I’m not a fkn English major

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We are getting the AI push where I work as well. We are licensing CoPilot through Microsoft 365. Best use of CoPilot for me, has been to summarize email chains and Teams threads. Especially if you were brought in mid-chain.

Otherwise, I haven't used it much.

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fnordhole@reddit

Use AI to write a resignation letter.

Let them replace you with a machine.

Boom.

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Candid_Ad5642@reddit

https://www.theregister.com/2024/06/14/bofh_2024_episode_11/

But it probably won't work in your case

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uncleirohism@reddit

There is never a reason to not proofread code before pushing out to prod, especially if an LLM has touched it. I’m happy enough with simply giving it a slew of customized templates relevant to my stack to learn from and suggest, but will never give it access to our full codebase.

Use it to attack (construct jailbreak texts against) other AI.

i mean ill use it for some low level tasks, or to give me a hand when im being a lazy dev, but it absolutely loves to make things up sometimes... So you always have to check the code/run it in a safe environment for testing.

its not perfect but it definitely helps save some time, or say im hitting a brick wall on a project and having a hard time coming up with a concept on how to achieve our goal, it can give me some ideas, or be like hey idiot you messed up here.

I also use it to help explain different code blocks more to understand things more as i go, as i am not a developer by nature, i just seem to always be writing code somehow though.

Seems to be best with Python and Golang, powershell is hit or miss, but generally its decent.

As with anything else its just another tool in the toolbox.

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pemungkah@reddit

I’ve used it for quick simple tasks that are maybe two-three steps. Still usually needs more than one iteration.

Example: I needed a quick podcast server running locally so I could verify that the chapter markers were correctly added to an MP3. It was faster to get ChatGPT to whip me up a dumb little Python script with the RSS feed set up properly than code it myself. Still needed to get it to refine the solution to ensure the logo showed in the feed, but basically had it done and checked in ten minutes, and I now have this tool for the future.

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StaticVoidMain2018@reddit

AI is baked into almost everything we use now in one form or another, I may be incorrect but don't - most search engines use ai? I would be dead as it support without that,

when I get play time as a dev, I use intellisence in VS which uses ai.
azure now has co-pilot in it which I'm sure if I was in an azure filled role I'd learn to use it when I've not got a powershell script, or use it to adapt my scripts for other purposes.

-The games I play in my breaks use ai and I would feel less motivated to work without those games

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hmmm_@reddit

Treat it like a brilliant but junior intern. It can go review documentation, suggest ways to do things, but it'll make mistakes. Not as often as maybe you're led to believe, but enough that you can't trust it completely. I use AI to research things before I go to Google. It can knock out basic scripts easily, or fix issues in scripts.

ChatGPT works better than Claude for me because I can give it a URL (e.g. a man page) and ask it to read it.

Both ChatGPT and Claude are awesome for creating python scripts and little programs.

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Pravobzen@reddit

Sounds like the real question is how can your company better develop and implement the use of LLM's for internal use?

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Huddy40@reddit

Use the AI to auto respond to the CEO's emails

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cjcox4@reddit

Pay? Why? I guess if you like burning money?

While the "old skill" was known as "Google-Fu", the new skill is issuing prompts that produce "what you want" out of AI. I have had success in adequately describing what I wanted "coded" and getting "ok-ish" results from LLM engines. Just some minor tweaks and "bam", a reasonable program. But, YMMV.

I haven't tried to get AI to produce "ansible".... Ansible is very abstract, so the odds of getting back "what you want" (how you've been designing things) could be "rare" (?)

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Alaskan_geek907@reddit

I use it to rewrite all my emails gling.to important people or vendors mainly.

Some other things I've used in the last month or so, alot of information on HTML and confirming my answers for questions in school, help editing powershell scrips I found while researching a project, review my resume.

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J-IP@reddit

I suck at Shell but I sure can ask copilot to throw something together for me when I need it. And I can then basically dictate what functions I need, verify them and compose together.

You could use it for ansible stuff or puppet or other tools as well most likely. So imagine everything you generally look up especially things you know enough to lookup up but not straight from the head.

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Burgergold@reddit

First question to AI is to ask it how it can be used in your job

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minimishka@reddit

He knows how to code more or less, at least how to create a skeleton that then needs to be finished with hands and a file, but he knows nothing about administration and the internal structure of the OS. More precisely, he knows, but does not understand how and why it is needed and what to do with it. It feels like he is just writing an essay. Even after 10 clarifying hints indicating what is wrong, he does not give up. Sometimes it seems to me that the admins from OpenAI did something to him so that in the future, when AI takes over this planet, everyone except them will lose their jobs.

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You got a lazy printer? AI!

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shell_shocked_today@reddit

* Use it to draft corporate-speak email responses.
* Scripts to automate some of your admin tasks (user management, backups, etc.)
* Generate memes to poke fun at coworkers / management