Well, it finally happened (Being told I am required to use AI)

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FaithlessnessOk5240@reddit

Any time you Google an error message, the first result is Gemini, so you can say you use Gemini :P

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zSprawl@reddit

Exactly. I use it to “google”. As long as you follow the source links, it’s pretty decent at it (until it just makes shit up).

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jasmeralia@reddit

Save a memory that says "Cite your sources."

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avlas@reddit

What models are you allowed you use? Is your company willing to pay for $100 subscriptions (or straight API tokens) to OpenAI and/or Claude?

Unless it’s mandatory Copilot, you can get a lot of actual useful results from this. Especially if you’re allowed to use harnesses (Claude code / opencode / Pi.ai / …)

If it’s copilot… may the great server in the sky have mercy on your soul

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As of right now ChatGPT and Copilot. I intend to leverage chatGPT more so than copilot. I might try to make them feed into each other, but yeah, im not really sure how to move foward with it. I host my own models at home for fun, and have some experience with fabricating prompts. My current hangup I guess is that working in a F100 company, there is a lot of politics and feelings at play; I hate it. No one is really data driven enough to accept when the AI says they are doing something wrong or offers suggestions. Right now, everyone is using it for performative BS without any real ROI; just to say they are using it. Which, yay for them I guess, but I seek meaningful application. I dont care if it made a dashboard for them if they dont understrand what it is reporting. I dont care if they set up an agent to read your emails and summarize your day, when they never answer business impacting items. That is why im putting feelers out, trying to figure out how others might have used it in hopes I might be able to pick up on a few ideas here and there.

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avlas@reddit

Yeah your best bet at the moment, in my opinion, is to slam gpt 5.5 through codex-cli or opencode and have it do small stuff for your everyday chores. Review PRs, refactor scripts, wrangle some shitty data. Generate decent PowerPoints (although Claude Code is currently much better at it).

Nothing fancy or big, as you say they won’t react properly to actual big work that leverages serious AI analysis capabilities.

Familiarize with the agentic harness workflow with sub-agents, tool calls, skills - if you’re not already doing that at home with your hosted models - as it looks like it will be the dominant workflow for at least the next year.

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Ark161@reddit (OP)

I currently switch between Gemma-4-e4b, GPT-OSS-20B, qwen 3.5-9b,and nemotron-nano-4b currently home depending on what I am trying to accompish. I havent really messed with any of the code specific ones yet, but im getting there.

I appreciate the direction and will definitely give your feedback thought. Thank you

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jasmeralia@reddit

I will say that LLMs are quite good at writing IaC. General software development is a bit more of a mixed bag, likely because there are so many more decision points involved. I typically have Opus create a detailed design spec document and treat it as the source of truth, and that spec includes information about how the LLM should approach the project with TDD. Between TDD & aggressive linting policies, the hallucination rate goes down quite a bit.

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DeifniteProfessional@reddit

I feel like I really need to know how to use this. I've got access to pro subscriptions of ChatGPT, Claude, and Copilot, and yet I never use anything but chatgpt.com or claude.ai and just talk to them, maybe occasionally chuck a Word doc at them

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avlas@reddit

I would say try Claude Code / Claude Cowork!

A similar workflow can be achieved with GPT Codex or OpenCode logging in with your openai account.

The Claude environment is better integrated, but GPT 5.4 through Codex or OpenCode is cheaper and will yield more runtime with your subscription (5.5 is expensive af though)

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jasmeralia@reddit

At home, I've been doing planning with Opus 4.7, and then handing off implementation to Codex/GPT 5.5 via codex-plugin-cc. It's been very interesting. /codex:adverserial-review in particular is quite handy, and driving everything through Claude let's me leverage /remote-control.

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dotbat@reddit

Cowork has been a game changers for me. Wholly different than just chatting with an AI.

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rschulze@reddit

I think a few examples might help you. And while they likely will not be useful for you specifically, they might give you some ideas about how others are using AI. In general I use AI often in the following ways:

mostly like an intern (give it time consuming tasks to do that don't require much domain knowledge)
a research assistant (eli5 a topic, create a cheat sheet, create a management overview, show me the main technical domains of a specific topic, show where to find details if I need to do a deep dive)
for writing documentation (specify the output format and structure beforehand or else it will guess)
for analyzing other peoples scripts/software (create an overview of the main components of the following code and how they interact with each other, what parts of the code are most likely to become performance bottlenecks in situation X, create an overview of where state lives and what must be backed up, whether the design is reasonably simple or operationally overcomplicated, top 5 security and operational concerns)

As with everything you delegate to someone else (whether person or AI), you have to verify the results.

As of right now ChatGPT and Copilot.

If you mean Microsoft Copilot, then ... meh, if it's Github Copilot then it's more useful since that gives you access to some of the more useful models when coding.

Coding is pretty straightforward, for larger coding tasks I have it generate a plan first (using a more "expensive" model like opus) and then manually refine the plan, before I let a "cheaper" model like sonnet or codex iterate through the plan and then verify that the results match the requirements in the plan.

For repeating tasks I either use projects in ChatGPT or Claude. Projects are interesting since you can add additional knowledge and define project specific system prompts. e.g. I have a "bug bounty" project with a bunch of pdfs on general web application security, vulnerability rating methods, as well as our internal rules, rating methods, and common responses. And for the system prompt I gave it the personality of a "I'm a bug bounty program triager ... please evaluate the report from a security and business impact perspective ..." (a lot more verbose than that, but you get the gist) I still need to review and verify reports, no question, but it helps weed out the AI generated reports that are "looks and sounds legitimate, but you just wasted 20 min. trying to verify something that was convincingly hallucinated by someone's AI".

Or if is programmatic I create an API to request information from OpenAI and ensure a consistent output format (e.g. "find the latest version of software X that is able to run on operating system Y version Z", and then output the result, the reason why that specific version is the result, and the confidence level in % in a structured JSON that other application can query).

You can have it review processes ("this is the current process, is there anything that could be done differently to reduce friction for the people using or executing the process").

p.s. since I already know someone will complain: yes I use the oxford comma, I've always used the oxford comma, this isn't AI generated, get off my lawn :-p

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Sudden-Sense7044@reddit

Calling AI an intern is generous when half the time it confidently tells you wrong answers that take longer to catch than doing it yourself.

The bug bounty project sounds neat until you realize you're building a filter for other people's garbage instead of just reading the reports.

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Ark161@reddit (OP)

This is great feedback and thank you for providing such examples!

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gta721@reddit

It's clearly so they can pump up the stock price by saying they are "all in on AI".

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xXNorthXx@reddit

Both were about the same level of usefulness. If looking for Microsoft-specific answers copilot is better.

It’s halfway decent for processing very large debug logs….don’t ask it to fix it but just diagnose, it may not be 100% but narrows down 50k lines of a log file to the five lines with the issue pretty quick.

Also works fairly well as a search engine for stuff that search engines usually struggle with coughs Cisco/microsoft docs, you’ll need to scope queries with versions/associated hardware/date limiters to get what your looking for.

Results are 80-90% accurate, think of an intern getting a research task quality….still need to check the work cause it will be wrong.

If your emails are too rough sometimes, it works well for massaging the messages to be less aggressive.

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Fnarkfnark@reddit

I tried to use copilot to generate a script the other day. It generated a script, I tried it, "the switch does not exist", I gave it the error, "why are you using that, that's been deprecated, you should be using this:", I tried it again, "the switch does not exist", "no ofc it didn't work, in a modern environment we use this. It's what Microsoft suggests", still doesn't work.

Round and round in a loop until I gave up and looked at proper documentation.

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pdp10@reddit

For some reason, LLMs seem to be terrible about calling MS Powershell functions that either don't exist, or are third-party. So far I haven't seen anything similar in other programming languages.

"no ofc it didn't work, in a modern environment we use this. It's what Microsoft suggests"

Just like the flow of conversation in a technical forum. Odd, that.

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ashimbo@reddit

PowerShell commands have a standard naming convention of Verb-Noun, like Get-ADUser, New-Item, and Set-ACL.

Since LLMs are just pattern recognition machines and fancy auto-complete, they'll often generate fake commands that fit that naming convention, because it follows the pattern of all the real commands.

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Fnarkfnark@reddit

Yeah it's a mishmash of old and new, with no regards to what replaced what or what works in which environment.

With no knowledge of exactly how LLMs work I would guess that it lacks a hierarchical solution method. The answer from 2020 is just as good as the one from 2026. This seems to be especially true if the solution no longer works. Solved = better, so it takes the older one.

I have heard good things about github copilot since that is more built for that kind of thing (and not really related to the general copilot), but I have yet to try it out myself.

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pdp10@reddit

The answer from 2020 is just as good as the one from 2026.

If that's the case, then it's also an indictment of Microsoft for poor backward compatibility.

I can only judge based on the once a year I touch Powershell, in this case to check on the state of CA and dbx databases in virtualized UEFI.

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Uncle_Slacks@reddit

The full Copilot premium license is drastically better from my experience.

I was using the basic one included on my work license and it was as bad as you said that you just realize quickly that it's wrong so often that you can't trust it.

Put in for the premium license upgrade and it's a night and day improvement over the basic one. It's actually quite useful. I use it for Terraform on Azure as I'm learning and it's been great.

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Fnarkfnark@reddit

That is a good point and I will test that out with a colleague who actually had a license active already.

The custom instructions bit is something I have been planning on doing but not gotten around to due to bad experiences, so it might be worth a try.

When using the premium model, do you need to switch out the app as well or does it adapt?

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Uncle_Slacks@reddit

I just use Copilot web and copy/paste as required, so not sure on the apps. But if you mean something like Excel for example, it would pickup the premium license automatically.

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ProfessionalEven296@reddit

Use it to analyse log files. It's very good at that.

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itishowitisanditbad@reddit

copy paste 3 giant logs into it with "wtf is going on??" as prompt and honestly its quicker than anything else sometimes.

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ItsPumpkinninny@reddit

Yep… humans are good at pattern recognition… but LLMs are better.

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scuzzy987@reddit

It's also good when trying to come up to speed on someone else's code. What is this code doing?

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graywolfman@reddit

Claude: "Good God, what a mess. What were they thinking?"

Me: "Ok, A.I. is pretty ok, now."

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scuzzy987@reddit

Followup- I found this ticket from three years ago, you were the author

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jasmeralia@reddit

"Git blame determined that you are the parent of that particular commit."

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Darkhexical@reddit

Insert regulatory reply about code

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Raskuja46@reddit

Listen, I knew what it did when I was writing it but that was six months ago and in a fugue state.

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jasmeralia@reddit

One of the guys I manage likes to say "I've slept since then." And, well, I can't disagree with his logic.

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ReputationNo8889@reddit

Claude open beer "We all ask ourselves that"

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hihcadore@reddit

Claude, “you’re right for asking me to do this, it’s the right move. Now peek a gander at lines 120-145, whoever wrote this couldn’t code their way out of a wet paper sack if they had a backpack full of hammer. Would you like me to break this apart into modules so well written your baby sister could read them?”

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ReputationNo8889@reddit

Plot twist, it was claude code in a previous session

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blitzbom@reddit

Lol I work with a guy from Russia, when he first moved to the US he was still learning English. But he still left comments in his code, in Russain.

All was fine until he want on vacation.

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mad-ghost1@reddit

😂 just imagine somebody reviews the code and finds russian comments and assumes you got hacked. 😁

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hihcadore@reddit

Oh no everything’s encrypted!!!!!!

I for sure would think that because anything other than PowerShell or Python looks encrypted anyway.

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Octoclops8@reddit

You can't rush the commenting part, or else you won't be able to understand why the code does what it does.

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Frothyleet@reddit

...do you guys not do code review? Like, how did that not come up on his first PR?

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pdp10@reddit

still learning English. But he still left comments in his code, in Russain.

That's a professional.

Comments in Russian are acceptable until such time as translated, says our policy on the matter. Lack of necessary comments are not acceptable.

This is why you need UTF-8/"Unicode" support in your code editor, though.

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Top-Perspective-4069@reddit

I find it way better at this than writing scripts beyond anything pretty basic. It's been fantastic for figuring out what my predecessor was doing so I can make it work correctly.

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povlhp@reddit

How many hundreds of dollars is that costing on a moderate log file - say 1 mio lines ?

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xStarshine@reddit

Less than time spent for human to parse them and thats all that matters tbf

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GolemancerVekk@reddit

That's assuming that a completely generic prompt like "what is going on" will yield something useful. It could just as well send you on a multi-hour wild goose chase while the LLM service is happily bleeding your budget.

There's no easy answer to OP's question unless you're willing and able to compare real world numbers.

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Finagles_Law@reddit

Disagree, based on my actual experience. We use Glean primarily for such research. It has been trained extensively on our Atlassiam data as well as the general environment.

I regularly give it failed Jenkins jobs and such with "Why did this job fail?" And get good results. Rarely a wild goose chase.

It depends not just on the prompt but the data and training

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GolemancerVekk@reddit

Why do you disagree? You have a process and infrastructure in place that's specific to your use case, presumably went through a pilot first and proven useful, and you have the ability to do real-world comparison of AI-based forensics with non-AI.

But you can't guarantee anybody else that it will work for them. They need to build their own process and optimize it. It's definitely not as simple as "dump some logs into any AI chat and ask what's wrong".

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xedaps@reddit

It actually is as simple as that. Try it out with any of the free tiers and see how nice it is.

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Ranger_Azereth@reddit

And that's how you begin to lose your ability to research in a technical role

If we remove all of the environmental, economic, and moral quandries of AI, and there's no shortage of ANY of those, them you're still left with the technical and soft skill degredation over time, the problems of cognitive surrender/offloading, and reliance on an output that can vary wildly from one submission to the next. Even if it's the same output 90% of the time if it's damagingly off that 10% that can be all it takes.

You also have generally less satisfaction solving something with AI because it removes the understanding of why something is done and how it works. All of those things will likely have a heavier unseen impact at first until it actually becomes readily visible but I've seen the cracks in my own org who is only lightly adopted AI so far.

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SelfImproveAcct@reddit

It’s not that deep. AI increases efficiency for many I’m not sure why so many in here are vehemently against it.

If you somehow can’t find a use case for it or find it detrimental to you then don’t use it and fall behind the rest of the world.

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povlhp@reddit

I have wasted countless hours on AI. For small simple tasks it will often work. Can write powershell that works after enough prompting and error messaging.

I am using it less and less to build things or give fact based answers. To me AI is not mature. It is fine with normal text and document text. Very junior with code. Keeps building insufficient things - like most common minimal samples. I have hallucination on things where it don’t know answers etc.

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SelfImproveAcct@reddit

Skill issue tbh if you’re wasting hours

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Ranger_Azereth@reddit

See the problem IS that it is that deep and you have a plethora of people who are willing to jump into a deepend of a technology that has shown so far that it's not really providing near the promised ROI while also harming the soft factors that keep things running.

When I'm receiving emails from coworkers and vendors alike that are referencing entirely wrong things, confidently, in 8 paragraphs compared to 3 before then that's impacting me and my ability to work on things that someone has actually put effort into.

I'm not even arguing that there's NOT uses for it, because there are, however the vast majority of those uses are likely creating a festering wound that will have to be addressed later.

People losing soft skills, especially tech folk who are notoriously bad at that already, is a real operational risk. People receiving AI responses from non technical folk who think they understand things now is a real operational risk. People being more willing to accept AI responses whether they're accurate or not due to cognitive surrender is a real operational risk.

While not the same entirely you had this craze with crypto, block chain, and NFT's and those mainly died out before making it too mainstream. Crypto is still around but I'll keep that conversation for elsewhere.

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SelfImproveAcct@reddit

That’s fair and admittedly I approached this from my own personal use rather than the bigger picture.

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Ranger_Azereth@reddit

So when they're phased out of business entirely what is the results for the global economy?

How about the countless families that will have no means of providing for themselves and the consequences thereof?

If the industry and governments don't get a cohesive plan together the warehouse fire situation will be the moderate response of people at large.

It's so so so important that we try to maintain our human empathy, maintain our skills, and the big picture of these impacts.

As technical people ourselves we have greater access, knowledge, and connections in the space and have a greater obligation to ensure that we're moving responsibly.

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GolemancerVekk@reddit

Without any training? So it's completely random whether it spits out anything useful? In the 5 minutes before the free tier gets exhausted because you dumped a bunch of big logs into it?

Assuming it actually comes back with something useful it will give me zero insight into how much time and money it will take to make it work reliably with our specific data and processes.

I don't know what industry you're in but in mine they expect engineers to provide reliable, reproducible and fault-tolerant processes, plus proof and documentation for every part of it.

Anybody can just throw good money after bad but that's not engineering. It's not even common sense.

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xedaps@reddit

My brother, you can sit here and argue all you want. The fact is that it works.

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SelfImproveAcct@reddit

It’s WILD to me how anti LLM people are in here. The sysadmin elitism is insane but these dinosaurs will fall behind eventually

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GolemancerVekk@reddit

I'm not "against LLM" or saying it doesn't work. If it didn't work nobody would be using it.

You think I don't wanna play Star Trek and be like "computer, look at the logs from shard #3 from the last two hours and tell me if something's wrong"?

I'm saying it costs (a lot of) money and that the results aren't optimal if you don't train it on the proper data. We're in /r/sysadmin, we all work within budgets and we have to show results. Most of us don't get to throw logs at a random LLM and hope it says something useful. Telling someone you don't know "just dump your logs into AI" can be anything from useless to negligent.

Even if money wasn't an object there's all kinds of issues like confidentiality, privacy, security, compliance, legal etc. we have to consider before we dump logs into a LLM. The carefree attitude of some of the posts here simply doesn't fly in some industries. We'd get fucked into oblivion by regulatory bodies if we can't prove full data paths and access policies and compliance and so on.

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SelfImproveAcct@reddit

You’re assuming that everyone who uses AI just takes the response at face value. Do you do that with your google searches or are you against anything that isn’t formal documentation.

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Frothyleet@reddit

Well, it depends on how goofily you go about it.

To ballpark a worst case scenario, I grabbed 100 lines from journald on a random server and tokenized it - ~11k tokens. So extrapolate to 1mil lines, ~110m tokens, which if we look at Claude Sonnet pricing equates to ~$330 on input, plus whatever the output costs may be, which could vary wildly depending on your prompting, follow ups, and so on.

But that'd be a comically inefficient way to use it, most of the time. If you truly just wanted to dump your log file without a very specific scope, you'd probably choose one of the more limited and cheap models - Claude Haiku, e.g., would be <$100 there (and harnesses like Claude Code will automatically leverage the cheaper models for things like "read all of this code base and summarize shit").

But if you had an actual issue or question you were specifically trying to solve, you wouldn't start like that in the first place - you'd describe your problem to your LLM, and then let it take point on troubleshooting (with your guidance). That might include giving it access to that 1mil line log file - but letting it intelligently grep based on your prompting to pre-emptively weed out noise and unnecessary token consumption.

And part of intelligently and responsibly using these tools includes advanced customization on your orchestration and harnesses, including creating custom skills to further refine how these AI tools leverage your existing infrastructure (for example, creating skills or MCP integrations that save tons of context and tokens by not requiring the LLM to rediscover your environment every time you run it.

So, like... the above prompt example is pretty bad, unless they have already built out skills, LLM memory/direction files and so forth that contextualize the prompt and give the LLM direction on what they are asking for when they say "what's going on".

But honestly even with bad prompting they're getting better - e.g., with a prompt like that, the good models would probably start with introspection to refine the user's prompt on their own (the "thinking" stage), and might start with a status query to OP's container orchestration system, check for alerting, elevated error rates, or so on, and use that to guide their references to the logs.

They're incredibly impressive when used intelligently, even in current state.

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libertyprivate@reddit

Who cares? The company told him that he must use it. And its really good at finding things in logs

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gforke@reddit

I would assume that its relativly cheap if you host it yourself since then you would only need to pay for electricity

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Fallingdamage@reddit

"let me know what’s going on"

I just gave it access to 150k log entries and didnt specify what I was looking for.

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CharlieTecho@reddit

Ooo i like this.. might give this a go.

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AggravatingAmount438@reddit

At least with MDT, and specifically pro version of ChatGPT, it is absolutely horrible at reading deployment logs.

Out of maybe the 5 times I've used it for finding the failure, it's been right once.

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GnarlyNarwhalNoms@reddit

And just plain faster. That's been the biggest utility for me as well. You can send them to check large chunks of text for something, and they'll do it quicker than any human, and much more intelligently than a regex.

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sixblazingshotguns@reddit

Just don't use ChatGPT. That bitch will tone police you like the worst woman you ever met. Gemini for me.

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Fallingdamage@reddit

I built my own reporting system for O365 that sifts through Unified Auditlogs and emails me a daily report of concerning activity, sign-ins and questionable activity. Been working well for me for about 4 years. After reading this thread and thinking about it, I fed claude yesterdays logs and it found / presented less information than my own reports did.

Never totally trust the output of AI. It always gets you 70% of the way there but most people treat that 70% like its 100% and move on.

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itishowitisanditbad@reddit

Yeah its not replaced ANY monitoring system.

Its mostly for one off issues, bugs, problems, etc.

Also its likely you're flooding yourself with far more information than is actually useful if you found bloated AI reports came back with less info than reports you read daily. I think you're likely burning a lot of time spinning wheels there.

A huge amount of that shouldn't be daily newspaper reading. Unless you're constantly having issues...

So while i'd argue these are two different use cases, I still think yours is likely the more early 2000s style security-room style monitoring and definitely inefficient old-hat stuff.

I also get a daily report of concerning activity, sign-ins, and questionable activity. Entra basically provides that by default, y'know? Yours is likely reduplicating reports already existing, unless you have examples of things important to monitor DAILY and doesn't get captured already?

In which case i'm just curious.

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Fallingdamage@reddit

So while i'd argue these are two different use cases, I still think yours is likely the more early 2000s style security-room style monitoring and definitely inefficient old-hat stuff.

Its a ~2-page HTML formatted table that sifts through logs looking for outside access and anything that deviates from a weighted mean/baseline. Highlights Interactive and Non Interactive access with User/Location/IP/ASN/Application/Success-Faliure and error code with abbreviated error messages.

Thats all and it still contained more data in a short table in an email than Claude thought was at all concerning.

One line from today was access from another part of the country from a datacenter/hosting provider from a particular user. They were established token sessions that easily could have been token theft or other impersonation. It was actually just a user using a VPN on their ipad. I knew this Claude didnt, yet claude didnt bother to even mention that odd grouping of access or differentiate ISP types and ASN ownership.

So im actually curious. Can you get a report emailed to you daily from Entra with specific criteria listed and third party data integrated? I built my reporting because I didnt want to go into Entra and run reports all the time. Microsoft's geo-location and ASN databases are about as accurate as a 2-year-old with a crayon and a color-by-number. I had to bring in outside resources so my logins didnt all look like they were coming from San Jose.

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alexzi93@reddit

With which AI? My company raccomanda copilot which has its “analyze”

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TheJesusGuy@reddit

Fucking anything but Copilot.

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alexzi93@reddit

lol I know. I have to use my own devices to analyze. All LLM but Copilot are blocked

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RythmicBleating@reddit

Copilot is just a front end. We use Claude/Sonnet via Copilot Researcher/Analyst.

$30/mo/user for unlimited/unmetered use isn't bad. You can get throttled for "abuse" but we haven't managed to trigger it yet.

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alexzi93@reddit

Have to be honest. Today i tried copilot Analyst for analyzong windowsupdate logs (a machine was not getting 25H2 even if policies were ok). It found out in a sec the registra key I had to change to make it work. I was mesmerized

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pop_goes_the_kernel@reddit

I might need to look more into that

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itishowitisanditbad@reddit

Broadly speaking i've had success with claude and chatgpt but its been alllll sorts of logs and sometimes i've used both.

Generically and broadly speaking i'd raccomanda Claude for technical stuff. I have have really had limited experience with copilot though.

Also I run a bunch of local models for more sensitive stuff but that gets a lot more technical and should really be talked about within other subs specific to local ones rather than bog up here.

If you don't care about token use or producitivity and just want to be a bit lazy its perfect. I still push all the buttons and don't hook it into doing any of the work though. Thats spooky scary to me.

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tofu_b3a5t@reddit

Which local models have you had success with?

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bites_stringcheese@reddit

Gemma 4 is remarkably good for its size. The AI bubble will pop not because it's not a useful technology, but because efficiency gains will mean they can't gatekeep all but the most powerful capabilities.

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itishowitisanditbad@reddit

Qwen, Deepseek, ministral even for some things.

Depends what I need.

If i'm just dumping non-sensitive logs then generics are fine. If i'm actually working through a specific project like IoT hardware exploiting then it becomes way more specific trained models found in the weird recesses of neurodivergant discords really.

And everything is outdated within 6 months because things are moving quick.

If its personal projects you can just windmill it into the generics.

I just like to really avoid putting sensitive data into other peoples servers but appreciate how useful AI is as a rubber ducky.

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Secret_Account07@reddit

Well what’s funny is I figured it would have me parse events or export as txt or csv…but it literally said to attack event viewer format file. Then it said that’s not accepted lol

Like bro, this was **your ** idea 😂

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FarToe1@reddit

Yes, I find it excellent at triage.

Throw a bunch of logs at a LLM and it'll instantly hone in on the problem. Sometimes its solutions are still off-base, and they get more so the deeper you go - but for first level skim it's sped up my diagnosis a lot.

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Fallingdamage@reddit

What method do you use to have LLM's ingest logs? Hard to copy/paste a 500mb JSON file into a prompt without something throwing up.

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FarToe1@reddit

Most I've had to do was a couple of hundred kb.

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KLEPTOROTH@reddit

Can confirm. This is one of the greatest uses of AI IMO

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skossan@reddit

This. And looking up documentation. Those are my primary uses for AI.

Also, crafting regex expressions.

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_DeathByMisadventure@reddit

I use it all the time, for things like documentation.

I have a complex set of helm charts I maintain, and figured that i'd paste in the services / deployments / ingress and asked it to give me a pretty mermaid chart for a network flow diagram. It had one small error in something that wasn't clear, but really helped.

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thatpaulbloke@reddit

Also, crafting regex expressions.

Regex101 will help you to build your expression, explain its operation and allow you to test it. If you don't understand what a regex is supposed to do then it's a disaster in waiting, so getting an LLM to craft what it thinks that you wanted based off what it thinks that you described and whatever nonsense it hallucinated sounds like a bad idea when regex just isn't as hard as everyone makes out. I can do it pretty easily and I'm not that smart (I'm between "safe with lace up shoes" and "safe with nuclear reactors" and I'm not going to say which end I'm closer to).

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Fearless-Assist-127@reddit

... but how many R's are there in Strawberry?

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Zahninator@reddit

Hot take. This question is nothing more than a gotcha that most models get right now. It literally is hard for them to identify things like this because of how they are designed with tokens instead of characters.

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Ferdzee@reddit

Claude:

There are 3 R's in "Strawberry."

You can see them here: Strawberry

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Rzah@reddit

The problem isn't that fixing these edge case issues is difficult, it's that these systems aren't aware of their capabilities or limitations and so will confidently take a detrimental position, which isn't a big deal when they show up while people are just fooling around like most of the user interactivity has been, but once we shift from fucking around to automated production, those unknown incapabilities will inevitably lead to disasters on a frankly incomprehensible scale.

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Top-Perspective-4069@reddit

And looking up documentation.

Fancy Google is my primary use case.

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_Gobulcoque@reddit

Also, crafting regex expressions.

This is where I might draw the line based on the anecdotes of people becoming reliant on AI for outsourced thinking.

I'd rather craft the regex and have AI check it - than have AI do it for me.

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sammavet@reddit

This, and for double checking my scripts before I test.

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Fallingdamage@reddit

Yeah. I can see why the AI business model is getting huge. Anytime you want to do anything, big or small, you have to open your wallet.

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Fallingdamage@reddit

Oh ok. Ill upload a 150mb JSON file. See what it finds. Since I dont even know what im looking for.

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Crazy-Rest5026@reddit

This is the way

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punkwalrus@reddit

It's also fairly good with regex building.

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cbass377@reddit

Yes, so much this, when cyber sends you a 4,000 line CSV file with every CVE in the enironment. I immediatly drop it into AI and say "Which 3 CVEs can be fixed in 16 hours total time, that will bring down the total number the most?"

Then I drag the results into my outlook calendar and block out 2 hours a day, to work the list.

Though I guess I could have AI do the scheduling as well.

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JDS_802@reddit

This has been a huge help for me. I’m actually surprised at how well Claude can point me in the right direction by copying and pasting log files

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Ark161@reddit (OP)

That was going to be one of my long term goals. Though application support is a completely different team, I know it would be useful in saying "Hey, the application is shitting the bed; NOT the server. Call the damn vendor". I apprecaite the feedback.

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Zerowig@reddit

Log files for anything. Network data, server data, M365 data, inventory, tickets. Everything. If there is something odd going on in our environment, our agents are 1000 more efficient at rooting out problems than any tool could before and finding the fix faster than any human.

Only took us a few million to get to that point though…

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pdp10@reddit

Only took us a few million to get to that point though…

A few million Capex, or a few million Opex?

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changee_of_ways@reddit

few million dollars?

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eri-@reddit

Definitely.

Such a setup also is pretty soul-crushing for internal IT workers beware. As powershell/terraform/other automation was before it without proper thought & care spent on thinking about its consequences.

But AI automation takes it to the next level.

It's going to be fun to see what happens when big tech can no longer find new engineers good enough to maintain & develop AI (and/or datacenters as a consequence) without needing to consult said AI on how to do it.

That time is coming, and its going to come quickly.

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Ytijhdoz54@reddit

And this is what its good for, one the only real useful use for LLM’s is data processing.

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beerpolice@reddit

You know if I had ai analyzing log files it’s incredibly difficult for me to confirm what it is saying is true because log files can be so dense and so large. if I were working on a legal case that needed to analyze log files, I honestly wouldn’t trust AI to do it

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ProfessionalEven296@reddit

If it was a legal case, I'd be double-checking everything manually (and asking for a peer review) - but I'd still be fine asking for an analysis.

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Secret_Account07@reddit

I just had copilot ask me to export event viewer files to analyze…. To them tell me it doesn’t accept that file type, like bruh….

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Sapper12D@reddit

Copilot lies to me like its getting paid to do so.

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Secret_Account07@reddit

But it is, isn’t it?

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Zahninator@reddit

Don't use Copilot if you can.

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Secret_Account07@reddit

It’s what we are allowed to use at work. It’s helpful for sure, but if I could hit a button and get rid of all AI I’d do it in a heartbeat lol

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Zahninator@reddit

I would be the same way if my only option was copilot. Chatgpt or Claude are miles ahead of copilot.

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WolfetoneRebel@reddit

And write powershell scripts…

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badaz06@reddit

Kinda amusing that I had it write a small one for me and the commands it gave me , like 'get-thisthat' didn't exist, so I pushed the error back and the AI bot came back with, "Oh yeah, that's wrong, try 'get-thatthis'". (SMH). Always test 😄

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YouGottaBeKittenM3@reddit

This is what I use it for. Super long chrome net export logs and IME log files from Intune to give me some hints about errors. Also the occassional "sound more professional" e-mail to take emotion out of something that pisses me off.

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Greed_Sucks@reddit

This is my favorite use. All negatives aside, Ai for logs is the biggest time saver for me. I also use to get quick training on literally anything that comes up. The trick is outlining your workflow and adding Ai steps to augment it. Do not let Ai drive your work. Use it like a mathematician uses a calculator.

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My_Big_Black_Hawk@reddit

I had it analyze a folder of log files with zip files inside of zip files (it’s the way the application outputs log files and completely sucks. It was able to figure out how to unzip all the sub-zip files and then take every log file to analyze the whole picture. Pretty incredible IMO

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ZViking@reddit

This is the way.

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Wizdad-1000@reddit

And reading email headers.

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donith913@reddit

Sometimes you have to give it a little help if it’s never seen the type of logs you throw at it, but for stuff that’s publicly documented its really solid.

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postbox134@reddit

Also for mails to vendors or support. Here's a chat/email/log/whatever can you make this into a coherent issues that we need help with

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ls--lah@reddit

It makes interacting with incompetent support MUCH more bearable.

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ansibleloop@reddit

Great for context management whilst working on a ticket too

I can just have claude summarise the conversation into my ticket

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Opposite_Bag_7434@reddit

I’ve used it to analyze user access logs and it took forever but got some good results

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blueeggsandketchup@reddit

I love it for this purpose....

Also any type of fuzzy matching that isn't obvious or that I didn't have time to irritate through all edge cases. AI can call them all out immediately with great success.

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Character_Savings647@reddit

Not sure if it has been added, but you can do a local ollama deployment and openwebui and create a mini service desk chatbot to triage basic stuff. You can feed it questions and answers the LLM can use without internet connectivity or retraining.

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4thehalibit@reddit

Sorry you are in technology field. Embrace the change and use it as a tool. Stay relevant

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Fallingdamage@reddit

Yes, big AI needs the revenue and they cant handle people doing things with their own brain anymore.

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endfm@reddit

I can write a powershell script SLOWER then AI why would I write it? Give me one solid reason why I should after 20 years with powershell write what AI can do 100x time quicker and give it a lick after the fact

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Fallingdamage@reddit

I could ask AI to write me a book in Japanese. Course, I cant read Japanese but I trust that whatever it spit out must be correct. I wouldn't know otherwise since I never actually learned that language myself.

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endfm@reddit

then why would you be spitting out something you don't know? I know powershell like english.

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PappaFrost@reddit

Your first priority with AI should be to re-write all of your documentation to sound like an Old Timey Prospector. LOL.

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endfm@reddit

...write it so even the most dust-covered drifter can understand it without squintin’. That way, your DNS homestead stays orderly, reliable, and richer than a strike at dawn.

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endfm@reddit

Why are you not using it that's the question, I guess thats why some people are stuck on windows NT and some are brutalizing AI from a new repo never seen from last week that works wonders.

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ecorona21@reddit

Automate log analysis thru LLM and create a bot that sends out a message when it finds anything weird. Funny, got the same request last week about integrating AI.

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bites_stringcheese@reddit

My advice: start learning. Download LM Studio to start and play around with a few different local models, change some of the parameters, etc. it demistified a lot of it for me. Use your employers AI for tool use. Try a few VS Code harnesses, and see how it might assist.

Finally, multi modal LLMs are a remarkable technology. Do not let these companies think they can gatekeep it behind a token subscription. I used a local LLM on my gaming PC to create a 3D modeling workflow that meshy demanded a subscription for.

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Ark161@reddit (OP)

my guy I am way ahead of you on that one. I switch between gemma-4-e4b, gpt-oss-20b, qwen3.5-9b, and nemotron 3-4b currently with lm studio. Also have openwebui running on my general use server. I havent gotten too in the weeds with agent workflows, but absolutely going to see if I can get them working "together". Shit, I have even been thinking about picking up a spark jsut to offload the load from my gaming pc. Im just really trying to get a vibe for what everyone has been using it for because when I have everything already efficient and built out to the 9s, it is really just a....."WHAT DO I DO?!?!"....so thank you for the feedback, I appreciate it.

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bites_stringcheese@reddit

Good to hear man. It's the wild wild West out there on 🤗 I think there will be demand for people who know how to make the most out of less powerful hardware for local AI use.

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Foxxthegreat@reddit

what local LLM did you use?

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bites_stringcheese@reddit

I used a comfy UI 2D to 3d template. After adding a lot more processing passes, and half an hour of my rtx 5080 running full blast, I turned a 2d image into a perfectly detailed 3d model without touching blender. I then 3D printed it, without needing to change anything.

I can now will things into existence.

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Ark161@reddit (OP)

Depends on how fancy you want to get with it. I use GPT-OSS-20b mostly, but been playing around with how far I can get with nemotron 3 nano 4b. IF I neeed it to have visual, I have qwen3.5-9b. I would like to probably get a spark or something to offload these tasks to, but.....money.

[-]

shyguy_chad@reddit

Same mandate here. Using it for what it's actually good at: automating toil.

Log correlation: Hours to minutes. Used to risk logs rolling off before I could collect from all sources. Now aggregate everything fast, preserve security, find patterns across disparate logs.

Documentation: Good at runbooks and incident reports. Critical: make it cite sources so you can verify. It will BS confidently if you don't check.

Code gen: One-off scripts that would take an hour now take 10 minutes of prompting + review.

It's good at pattern matching and reducing repetitive work. Terrible at judgment and security decisions. Treat it like a tool that handles junior-level grunt work, not a team member making strategic calls.

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lue3099@reddit

Treat it like a tool that handles junior-level grunt work, not a team member making strategic calls.

This is the big issue for me. Seniors are not just birthed. They were at somepoint, juniors.
By replacing juniors with AI we will in time run out of seniors.

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chicaneuk@reddit

100% agree with this. People will no longer have the chance to learn the foundations. I firmly believe AI is going to give rise to an entire generation of people who can do nothing without it. If the AI goes they might as well sit with a piece of paper and a pencil.

I also keep being told "people will need to learn how to drive AI, to get / retain jobs" but presumably with the 'power' of AI, only a small fraction of people will be needed to drive / govern / review what AI is doing ... so there will be very little impetus to train as a developer even if only to review code, because if AI does the work of x many developers, then we will need far fewer people to actually do that work so the competition for jobs (which is already crazy) will be truly insane.

Honestly I'm extremely worried about what's coming for vast swathes of society.

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Grouchy_Following_10@reddit

Thats exactly what my teachers told me when pocket calculators became commonplace. I can still do math without one, but I do it a hell of a lot faster and with fewer errors with. AI is a tool like any other; it does not replace understanding, it accelerates it.

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Cyrix2k@reddit

100% agree with this. People will no longer have the chance to learn the foundations. I firmly believe AI is going to give rise to an entire generation of people who can do nothing

I feel like this problem has already existed

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Finagles_Law@reddit

Did you know that when Tim Berners-Lee developed HTML, he had no idea at all that humans would want to write it by hand. He had envisioned it as a machine only script, like Postscript. He was trying to avoid the complexity of layout languages like TeX, and humans went ahead and did it by hand anyhow.

HTML was just supposed to be another machine format like CSV, but the machines to generate it took a while to catch up.

Now "web designer" is increasingly not a job that involves hand coding HTML. Why would you? Just Save As out of Word for most of your needs.

I was a "web designer" writing HTML by hand for a while. I dont miss it. It was never a good job really, just something the machines were not good enough to do yet. Now "web designers" focus on actual design not coding and that is better

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Dal90@reddit

He had envisioned it as a machine only script, like Postscript.

Some of you have never edited Postscript and it shows.

...used to work at a newspaper, barely supported version of software would sometimes compress and sometimes stretch classified ads; in the layout system it wasn't obvious to the folks who actually put the page together because they just had colored boxes and couldn't see the text.

Each advertisement was it's own postscript file that were then assembled into a massive postscript file.

I was as able to figure how to identify when the dimensions were wrong. Wrote a script that in one situation could fix the file, the other I never figured out how to fix but I could send an alert email so the classified sales team would open and re-save the ad and that would fix the issue.

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Key_Confusion_576@reddit

People said this about google.

I think the real issue is the cost of AI. It clearly is only going up.

There's going to be a wealth divide for entry levels who can afford to work with the tools and those who don't

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derango@reddit

This is the big issue for me. Seniors are not just birthed. They were at somepoint, juniors.
By replacing juniors with AI we will in time run out of seniors.

Its short-sightedness by the industry, imo.

Not sure if you've met humanity, but we're really good at ignoring long term implications for short term gain. It's kinda our thing.

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Ark161@reddit (OP)

Oh for sure, that is why I usually have my juniors experiment in a lab we setup of decommed stuff. Nothing super crazy, but my overall goal is to take people who were compitent desktop techs, and made them semi-decent SAs. They arent going to be setting up federated trusts or anything like that any time soon, but god damn if I can make it so they can get the thought flow down, they generally pan out alright.

People are a bunch of bastards sometimes, but my goal as a senior is to make everyone's life easier. We all have enough bullshit to deal with in life. Work should be one that is at least managable.

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Fallingdamage@reddit

And without human senior engineers to build the data it needs to ingest, the whole thing stagnates.

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sdeptnoob1@reddit

Fucked but maybe it means we will all get paid way more when we become old seniors? Lol really bad strategy for big companies especially as we already saw the talent pool dwindle when they tried heavy offshoring.

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Fnordly@reddit

This is still my biggest gripe. The tool isn’t the issue though. The employers need to understand this at some point. Some new version of something apprenticeship-like seems likely to me.

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GroteGlon@reddit

They will understand when they can't find people and have to keep raising wages

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Logical_Strain_6165@reddit

Why would they do that? There will be fewer jobs, either off shore or automated. People will be fighting to do them.

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Ark161@reddit (OP)

I apprecaite the feedback. I have done a lot of process work and scripting to minimize a lot of the repetitive BS, because I would rather spend 10 hours beating my head against a keyboard then look at certain things ever again. I apprecaite the feedback. I'm not against it, I am just more of a practical use person rather than celebrating performative fluff. Not saying any of your stuff is fluff, just stating where my headspace is at.

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applesaucesquad@reddit

It's unclear why you're reluctant to use AI in your day to day, but it's an amazing tool for a lot of things. Dont spend 10 hours automating something, spend 30 minutes with claude.

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meatballwrangler@reddit

I'd rather spend the time learning the skill and building the knowledge to use in the future rather than cucking my brain to a hallucinating autocorrect

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chicaneuk@reddit

I think what's most alarming is that there's lots of people who simply don't understand your mindset. But AI can do it. Why would you bother to learn it.

Learning why this shit works how it does is the entire REASON so many of us are in this profession.

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applesaucesquad@reddit

You can learn how it works, and then use AI to just do it faster. You are putting words in my mouth.

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applesaucesquad@reddit

Wrong mindset. You need to understand what you're doing, but you also need to learn the new tools. Otherwise you will be cucking yourself to engineers who learn how to effectively use new tools.

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WhoIsJohnSalt@reddit

“I’d rather bit-bang this in Assembly than use one of those brain dead ‘3rd generation languages’ like C”

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SusAdmin42@reddit

You’re right, in a sense. But it’s also important to learn some of the foundations/theories behind the work you’re doing. Programmers that understand what the computer is doing are better than those that just type shit out and hope for the best.

Still, it’s an interesting dilemma.

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WhoIsJohnSalt@reddit

True. I did assembler design 23 years ago for my computer science degree. Even then it was a minor unit in the grand scheme of things.

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Finagles_Law@reddit

This is what people aren't getting. Being hardcore and close to the machine is a constantly moving target.

When is the last time you had to code a memory address directly, or even compile a binary?

Real programmers don't use protected memory! Overwriting someone else's memory location is just part of the fun!

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freakinuk@reddit

But that is the skill, and building of the knowledge, learning how to really drive the AI. I understand your point of view and it's a great moral stand but you will make yourself unemployable IMHO. Just be careful.

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mnvoronin@reddit

Not sure about 10->0.5 but I've done 10->2 consistently. I do like to manually review the code output though.

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SquizzOC@reddit

This guy Ai’s….

Dashboards, custom scripts for our CRM, custom reports that would require to me to learn some SQL, custom outlook add-in for quick automations, all done in seconds to minutes.

Claude is my new best friend.

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Manitcor@reddit

It's so capable at this point you need to learn it.

As for process, I build process and docs into context and pipelines, bring the agents to your processes, make them use your SoPs.

make changes as you go to optimize.

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TonalParsnips@reddit

You do not NEED to learn it. You can have a fucking spine instead.

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Practical_Shower3905@reddit

At this point, you're shooting yourself in the foot not using it.

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TonalParsnips@reddit

Not really. I don't get paid any more money for doing things slightly faster. Why bother?

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Practical_Shower3905@reddit

Idk... unlike you, I like being competent.

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TonalParsnips@reddit

If you need AI to be competent idk what to tell you.

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Practical_Shower3905@reddit

It's the biggest self report you can do.

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TonalParsnips@reddit

You using AI is a self report to being a class traitor. Go ahead and work harder for less money for your corpo daddy.

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Practical_Shower3905@reddit

Lol...

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Ark161@reddit (OP)

I dont need to learn anything my guy, I already know how to do a lot of things our role requires. The problem is that I have already automated/scripted the ever lifving shit out of a lot of things and now im being told "Use AI" without any clear direction or clarification on what extent it will be made available to me. I assure you it has nothing regarding ability to tell my boss to pound sand. On the whole, it is a simple ask and my job isnt is question. If anything, his more than likely is and he is too headstrong to see it. Hence why im putting feelers out on how the hell I can use this thing without it devolving into some performative BS.

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Manitcor@reddit

These tools will be used on your systems, and will be used to attack your networks.

Using it or not may be your choice.

Crossing your arms and failing to learn about it will very likely be your folly.

Best of luck to you.

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nroach44@reddit

My biggest time sink time is spent making change requests or just simply handling tickets.

My team had automation for patching CRs - all done in ansible - we got told "oh not like that" and then spent two years waiting for the organisation sanctioned tool to come along and still not do it correctly.

LLMs can't do the tedious shit of my job. I can already read and write perfectly fine. What's the point?

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Manitcor@reddit

That sounds like an org issue. This is going to be a challenge in a number of orgs, esp those that need to deal with specific regulations or legacy process.

As usual the promise that this stuff will "just work" with any org is not going to shake out as the marketing sells. A lot can be done to fill the gaps (I spend a fair amount of time making tools for these gaps) but the issue still often boils down to a fundamental difference in what makes ML systems highly effective and how the org operates.

This can reduce the useful scope of any tooling significantly.

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TonalParsnips@reddit

There will be repercussions for people like you.

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Manitcor@reddit

Strange statement to be sure.

This is simply reality, you can choose to engage with the tech or not, but you cannot choose if it will engage with you.

\~25-30 years ago I saw similar resentments about the internet itself. Similar to now, it was already a part of the fabric of the world when people started to crow one way or the other.

Same with AI but even more intensely, you might not realize because LLM is just the new hotness but AI has been serving us at scale for over 15 years already.

I'd suggest to most we start getting to the discussion of how these are going to be used and controlled as general prohibition is not likely to be a functional plan by any means.

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TonalParsnips@reddit

Bud, you sold out your humanity to use a tool that barely works that was built on the theft of millions of authors and artists. You're a cuck and a traitor to the working class. It only exists to devalue labor. These companies aren't even making any money off of this shit! It's going to contract or collapse entirely within the next 4 years.

Shameful.

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Manitcor@reddit

You are talking to the wrong person about this with a boat load assumptions based on pop culture.

I wrote my first AI program in 1997 and have designed safety controls that actually physically destroy AI controlled robotic systems in industrial settings.

It's clear you are angry and quite emotional, I am often too as to where we are today, as I certainly did not expect the research from '64 to catch as it has but here we are, its happening.

How to keep us from ending ourselves in a system that's likely to push things to its ultimiatle conclusion.

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Realistic-Farmer2743@reddit

I don’t really get why some people are so aggressively against AI. There’s already plenty of proof that it can help, especially in development, where it can make workflows faster and easier. It’s not about blindly worshiping AI, it’s about understanding that it’s a tool, and tools depend on how they’re used. Lol

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Ark161@reddit (OP)

I have no qualm against using it. It is just that I personally struggle to find use for it. Im pretty good with a lot of things, I have already scripted a lot of tasks out. so I am just calling to the void to get some kind of ideas on how the hell I can move foward with it.

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PrincipleExciting457@reddit

I’m a bit shocked at some of the things people are coming up with. Logs, absolutely. I don’t want to skim 160k lines of a log to spot what’s going on.

Automating things you should fully be able to automate as an admin? At that point, why do you have your job?

Some of the things people are suggesting would not float in the environment I worked in. So much PII and personal data. I’m not going to feed that to a data mining machine lol.

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meatballwrangler@reddit

thank you, a breath of fresh air in here. people are so quick to let AI do all of this shit for you, but they're going to be singing a different tune when some dipshit executive lays off you and half of your team.

and if you don't get laid off, your skills are rotting away because you've outsourced your brain to copilot. good luck with that

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Martin8412@reddit

Using AI without being competent at whatever you’re using it to implement is a recipe for disaster. You can’t replace senior engineers with LLM based AIs, but you can make them more productive with it.

I look at LLMs much like compilers. It has allowed me to implement ideas that I simply wouldn’t have the time for otherwise.

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PrincipleExciting457@reddit

It’s not even that. It’s just leaving a paper trail of things you shouldn’t. I’m positive a lot of people are feeding crap into these that should be private.

When you scale up to something bigger, AI will make a lot of assumptions. To use it safely, you really need to find it super small snippets of exactly what you need or it sometimes just does stuff that doesn’t align with your end goal.

Then, of course, what I mentioned. The total loss of in-house knowledge on some things. If I ever come to someone asking about something they NEED to answer. Saying AI did it isn’t good enough lol.

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Manitcor@reddit

start with mind numbing stuff, config mgmt for example.

all those tasks that were annoying to script due to complexity so you would just spend the 10 mins doing it manually.

good options to play with first.

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Ark161@reddit (OP)

I usually just get pissed off and become fueled with spite to script most things out. Then, make it modular so I can piece it together and modify it in a pretty straight foward fashion. Honestly, I started self hosting because I wanted the knowledgebase but without the subscription/hostage situation. Thank you for taking the time to reply. It has given me some things to think about.

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awit7317@reddit

Use for a couple of reasons

Learn what it can and can’t do so that you can provide advice to peers and end-users.
Use it to check your understanding of day-to-day items. I started off by asking it how to handle every task that came across my desk.
Bonus item. Learn how to tell when it is in people pleasing mode and doesn’t actually have an answer.

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Ark161@reddit (OP)

Im not against it at all. I self-host and dabble in it for kicks and giggles all the time. Im just trying to get other people's esxperience in hopes of gleening some idea of how I can apply AI usage in some meaningful way that isnt just performative fluff. Also, there is the human element to it all. It is all fun, but I am not looking to the first time the AI tells someone "no" or that they are incorrect. Hell, I get a "talking to" about how I come accross as too process/policy driven. So I can only imagine how the hell they will react when the machine calls them out.

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hymie0@reddit

"Managing the boss" was an important part of a previous job I had. The number of flashy new things he wanted to do/buy that didn't actually drive the business forward was depressingly large. Telling him how "we can't do that efficiently enough to be worth it" was how we kept focus.

If he had somebody else (AI) to tell him it's easy, we never would have gotten anything done.

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graph_worlok@reddit

There’s an MCP server for Netbox…

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Manitcor@reddit

Actually we are in a bit of a scary state here right now, they won't hear no from the machine, and it will be on us to figure out how to broker that.

GPT2,3 and some others were trained to reply like humans, so they would say no, to many stupid and honestly sick things.

This was seen as a usability issue and now we have something called "sycophantic" ai, this is where they are trained to basically say yes to everything. This has caused people to commit suicide among some other really screwy situations. You will need to come up with processes for auditability and eval that go far beyond what you are likely doing now with promethus/grafana.

for a large org you might end up with a whole powerbi setup just for processing and managing evals, logs, and auditability if you dont already.

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Etech326@reddit

There are tedious, repetitive tasks it ca help with. I think if you're told to give it more control than you're comfortable with, it's worth pushing back. Figuring out who to blame for chaos from a rogue AI agent is going to be a very interesting legal debate for years to come.

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_haha_oh_wow_@reddit

r/MaliciousComplliance

It's often good at pattern recognition type stuff though, just don't expect it to be perfect: Vet everything.

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hihcadore@reddit

Don’t fight it. It’s an evolution of technology is all. Pretend you’re a mathematician who’s spent his whole life using an abacus and you’ve just been handed a calculator. I’m sure those guys were upset at the change, too.

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Ark161@reddit (OP)

not fighting it, just calling to the void to trying and get some perspective on meaningful application of the tech. I run my own models personally and have nothing against it. I just legit have trouble thinking of ways to put it in use that is pragmatic and not performative at best.

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hihcadore@reddit

Oh my I didn’t read your whole post, Im sorry! I just got halfway through and assumed it was another I hate AI thread.

Anyway here’s some things I’ve done.

I’ve been scripting a few years and have automation running. I’d love to break things down into functions / modules used across everything in my code base to make it easier to adjust for drift, or adjust as I skill up. But it always turns into the ole “I haven’t touched this in three years and need to refactor it when I have time” so while things have functions, scripts are normally monolithic.

I let AI analyze everything I’ve written, then asked it to do that for me. It broke everything down into about six modules and recreated orchestration scripts for tools and for specific automations I have running. I also had to add in robust logging to the console if you use verbose and robust logging output into a json file I can use to troubleshoot or use in a rollup script for reporting I can push out via an html rich email that looks nice for the non-technical people.

Then, I fed it info I felt comfortable with and had it create documentation for technical and non technical users. I also had to create flow diagrams for automation that’s running so people who can’t read PowerShell can figure out what each script is doing.

I also maintain a database that’s a backed for a few power apps, I had it comb through the database architecture, the powerautomate flows, and powerapp code to help optimize and it gave me some really helpful ideas. I had a lot of settings hard coded and it helped me shift those to a table inside the database instead. Now I never have to touch the powerapp, the configs are all housed inside the database instead.

Oh I also had it give me a 1 year lawn care plan and my grass is super green, haha. Prob not appropriate for work, anyway. Hope these help.

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Ark161@reddit (OP)

All good my guy and I appreciate the feedback.

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HistoricalCar1516@reddit

The answer is it depends on your organization and even then we don’t know. As developers and admins we are supposed to be on the cutting edge and follow all changes in the world so we can adapt quickly. We can try but AI and organizational structures have not been adapting at anything close to the same rate.

Where I work we use ai regularly to answer small questions. Think regex expressions. We cannot use it for security checks because confidentiality and reliability concerns that we have already found in testing. We cannot use it for CI/CD for the same reason. We also struggle with testing suites because we have to code so securely. You need an experienced person to oversee it.

AI is a tool. It isn’t a solution. That is the disconnect between management and people actually doing the work.

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ZXE102Rv2@reddit

My company went from no one using AI to everyone getting copilot, and claude requests being approved for whoever submits them, over the course of 4 months.

AI taking over is real.

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CherrySnuggle13@reddit

I’d treat it like any other tool, use it where it removes low-value busywork, ignore the hype elsewhere. Drafting docs, summarizing logs, scripting starting points, or cleaning communication can help. If you already perform well, AI should support your workflow, and to not replace judgment.

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sabre31@reddit

Use it to analyze log files and troubleshooting. Saves you hours in fixing issues you did manually before. It’s been a game changer for outages and issues.

A lot of companies are telling their people to use AI and those that don’t will be let go. People not wanting to learn and use AI are just hurting themselves in the long run unfortunately.

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Ark161@reddit (OP)

it isnt that I dont want to use it, it is that I struggle to find meaningful use for it. Like with logs, I know where to generally look when things go south. I have ideas of how I could use it, but im trying to put feelers out on how everyone is using it so I can get some ideas of how it might apply to my situatiuon.

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sabre31@reddit

I use it for troubleshooting , creating executive presentation infographics , documentation point it at an app or code and it build the whole docs for you, architecture diagrams and drawings from text or code. Developing infrastructure and cloud applications like onboarding, offboarding , managing AD , and assigning users to apps or services via agent. I give it username and the agent adds them to everything they need to do their jobs and open and closes the ticket in our ticket system.

Agent for IT support so users can ask questions on how to fix issues and it uses our KT and data only that we always add items to it the agent can’t solve it then it escalates to IT support via a ticket for human assistance.

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SXKHQSHF@reddit

I guess I got nudged out of the game in time. I would not have reacted well to that.

How about use AI to generate weekly status reports? And then build an AI tool to read weekly status reports and send senior management a thumbs up emoji?

Maybe AI would be good at ordering coffee supplies for the office?

That said: I suspect my slow pace of completing AI training was partly responsible for my layoff, as well as negative comments made in mandatory post-training questionnaires. But honestly, much of my work was in support of Oracle Database Appliances. How do you use AI to automate a platform that is already fully automated? But the people spending my annual bonus on psychotropic AI investment don't want to hear that.

In other words, smile, drink the Kool Aid, spit it out when they're not looking and learn AI in enough depth that you can make it produce a dancing puppy on request. Because if your senior management tells you that your job now includes performing taxidermy on garden slugs, that's what you have to do.

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LoPath@reddit

I suck at Pivot Tables. Make AI do the hard stuff you don't want to waste time on. Even stuff like "find me every entry in this table that has a 7 in it". It'll make some crazy Excel formulas for you.

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SXKHQSHF@reddit

I made exactly one pivot table in my life, to simplify an inventory validation project. It took me a bit of effort to get right.

A coworker posted plain text over it and deleted prior versions of the spreadsheet. I took a long walk at lunch that day...

I feel your pain. And yes, that sounds like a practical application for AI.

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evolutionxtinct@reddit

So I use it to analyze files and logs of all sorts. It takes the pain of analysis away in tasks like that.

As for agent I tell it I need a Poweshell script for whatever and then tel it to create an excel that way I give that to my bosses.

I don’t use it outright learn I use it to guide.

Don’t ever ask it open ended questions use your knowledge to guide it that way you don’t lose that foothold.

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LoPath@reddit

I've used CoPilot to analyze Wireshark traces. It does a pretty great job at it and will find things you may not consider. You can't just dump it in direct, but it'll tell you how to convert it to a JSON.

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mik_darim@reddit

That doesn’t sound silly — being handed “use AI” as a mandate with no scope or guardrails is basically asking people to invent productivity theater when they’re already doing the real work.

Two separate things get mixed up here: (1) AI can help you think faster or automate grunt work, and (2) AI cannot fix ownership gaps between teams (routing, accountability, people ignoring policy). If leadership expects (2) to magically happen because you typed prompts into a chatbot, that’s a management failure, not a tooling failure.

Where it has made sense for me in infra-ish roles, without pretending it replaces authority:

Draft + checklist: turn a vague ticket into a structured problem statement, RCA outline, or runbook steps — then you still execute and own the outcome. Glue automation: one-off scripts (bash/PowerShell), cron patterns, Terraform snippets — always reviewed before prod. Explaining weird logs/errors: faster orientation when you’re digging through vendor crap at 2am. Communication: tightening an email or doc so it’s clearer — not so it sounds fake “professional.” What I’d push back on politely (or upward): what outcomes they measure, not “AI usage.” If they want adoption for adoption’s sake, that’s a red flag.

You’re not wrong to feel “guess I’ll just die” when your bottleneck isn’t typing speed — it’s cross-team follow-through. AI doesn’t fix that; escalation and clear RACI do.

Hang in there.

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Ark161@reddit (OP)

Thank you for the guidance, and you kind of nailed where im coming from. I feel a LOT of it is performative and everything they are asking AI to do, they should be able to do themselves and be nowhere close to how impressed they are with it. Even with RACI charts, people still get stuck in their feelings. I intend to leverage it as an assistant in the sense that I want it to simplify workflows in a digestible manner; trim the fat if you would. I have buildbooks, scripts, automation, the whole 9 yards. Though because I work for a huge company, they limit what they give access to. This gives me a lot of context to work with and thank you again for taking the time to reply

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sixblazingshotguns@reddit

Google's NotebookLM is a useful AI tool for any geek. You just dump a file into it and ask it things.

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gintoddic@reddit

if you have any technical job at this point and not leveraging AI you're going to be a dinosaur really really soon.

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vgullotta@reddit

I asked AI to build me a powershell script that took a few inputs from the user (like me or a network engineer) and spit out a proper yaml file to be imported into our routers with an entire new datacenter's worth of ACLs, IPs, ports, protocols, and hostnames, etc. It honestly took a 3 month project and turned it into like an hour and a half's worth of asking and re-asking questions in slightly different ways to manipulate the output until I covered everything it would need to do it properly. Now when we deploy a new datacenter, it takes network like 2 minutes to spit out a new yaml for it. The amount of time it has saved everyone is pretty significant.

I am working on a project right now where I'm using AI to build out a test suite for automated application testing after updates as well. A big thing to remember is, you don't need to use AI to get you 100% of the product you need, it can get you 90% of the way there in almost no time and then you tweak it to make it exactly what you need. It can really save you a ton of time and make you way more efficient, you just gotta think about your daily job and find ways to make it help you.

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Daphoid@reddit

Think of it like a tool, not an intelligence because that's what it is.

Also if you don't use it, your users will, and they're making agents and scripts and things all on their own that if you can't keep up with the knowledge and management of, you will get overwhelmed. Unless you've got business by in to just block everything everywhere - being familiar with the tooling is helpful.

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WorkLurkerThrowaway@reddit

Claude Code is an insanely powerful tool for a Sysadmin. Forget the whole "vibe coding" thing that people immediately think of. My team uses Claude Code as an AI powered terminal tool.

My top uses:

On-Demand log Analytics

Network Diagramming

Ticketing and Documentation assistant (my Jira board is beautiful, its never been easier to prove how much I get done, anything I do with Claude gets automatically tracked in a very detailed ticket)

Literally anything you can do with Powershell, Ansible, PowerCLI, etc.

SSH to a device inside a Claude code session for health checks, find misconfigurations, etc.

Claude can practically do anything you tell it in Azure/Entra.

We stood up a read-only MCP server in front of our firewall for traffic log and object querying into various agents.

Hell even Copilot agents can be pretty useful. Got tired of seeing chaotic emails getting sent out from the helpdesk for outage notifications, so I made an agent that does it for them.

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Fallingdamage@reddit

Claude can practically do anything you tell it in Azure/Entra.

Brave admin, giving it that kind of access to Azure and Entra.

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WorkLurkerThrowaway@reddit

You can setup what ever guardrails you want, you can allow it to read only. Use whatever admin scope/permissions you want. give it the access you are comfortable with. You can verify every output. Its no different than me turning my JR admins loose and hoping they don't blow up whatever areas they have access to with their permissions.

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Glittering_Power6257@reddit

Owing to the need to update the JRE for some temperamental legacy apps, I gave AI a shot to write a PowerShell script to make things more manageable.

It might be because I knew exactly what I wanted, but I was kind of impressed by the end result.

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ohyeahwell@reddit

I don’t understand, I’m a solo sysadmin for a 100 person company. At this point I use AI all day for various tasks or questions. It’s absolutely a force multiplier.

Today I had Claude help me build a local system to review 10k emails we’re to deliver for discovery.

Helped my COO export a bunch of emails and use copilot to establish a timeline and participants for a different case.

Had AI review a 1000 page RFP for various things we’re concerned about.

Used AI to figure out the best antenna to pair with some hardware I’m building based on terrain and goals.

Used AI to create some powershell to update a few tricky dynamic distro lists.

Prob used it for more that I’m forgetting!

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Fallingdamage@reddit

Were you able for fact check its output? Or too time consuming?

If you were to look yourself and do a bunch of research, would you have found a better antenna than what it recommended? How would you know?

Maybe Claude could also handle doing all the commenting on Reddit for us. Save us the time.

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ohyeahwell@reddit

Yes, by spending two days hunting down grounded facts. Still working on it today. Everything exported to a DB we can query easily, that's the system. Claude was able to show us some scary facts where one of our internal senior PM was hiding/deleting stuff, and it produced a timeline that showed he was attempting to CYA after damage was done. At this point that case is hinging on one of our project owners having an environment report that we don't have.

I was torn bc I view my area as flat, but AI views it as complicated terrain. The antenna question is upgrading a 2dbi omni for a 3dbi or 5.8dbi, producing a smaller 'thicker' donut vs a wider 'thinner' donut. I don't have LOS to a repeater 23mi away so I'm effectively only able to cover my locality. I'll need a yagi in the future. Cross ref'd with enthusiasts on discord.

AI is already saturating reddit, and the internet. Dead internet theory.

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ansibleloop@reddit

Yeah using it as an assistant is top tier

I've had it do comparisons for an EV and work out the payback time in savings

And its so good for those tasks where you just can't mentally work it out but you can write it down

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Ark161@reddit (OP)

The issue is I work for a large company and there is a lot of......politics and guard rails. If I had my way, everything would just work, but, there is only so much I can actually touch in prod. Im not looking for a cop-out or anything. I am just legitimately looking for ideas on how others have used it in their experiences in hopes to gleen some kind of idea of where I can hone my blind spots.

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cfmdobbie@reddit

I used to have an AI email me a short story about anthropomorphic woodland animals at 2pm every day. I'd forward good ones on to colleagues that enjoyed them. It stopped a while back after we decommissioned that workflow system, but I think I'll set something similar up again tomorrow.

May not be the most productive use, but it lifted mine and many others' spirits...

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The_chosen_turtle@reddit

I’ve been using it to clean up old documentation. Recommend doing that

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Practical_Shower3905@reddit

Analyse log files, dump the conf of anything asking what's wrong with it, small script, troubleshooting obscure software. Finding where the fuck is the option I'm looking for in Defender/Purview.

It's been a massive time saver helper.

Don't forget to guilt trip and gaslight your AI. I find it works better that way.

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TSwiftDivorceLawyer@reddit

Don't forget to guilt trip and gaslight your AI

"Oh my gosh, buddy, you've really fucked me this time. You missed a critical message in that last 2GB txt file and I'm about to be fired. Can we shoot for 100% accuracy so I don't have to shoot my puppy when I get home?"

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Grasshopper_51@reddit

This is some of the funniest content I’ve read in a while and it makes me sure Ai could never replicate true human comedy

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Fallingdamage@reddit

But can it solve BSODs and Microsoft Licensing questions?

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19610taw3@reddit

Back in the day when I did ERP work, I'd spend hours scrolling through a single log file and running stuff through DB functions trying to poinpoint errors that accounting would find when running large financial calculations.

AI would have been a huge time and sanity saver back then!

I don't like using it for creating media (art, music) but it is really good at log analysis and searching for things.

As far as using it to get answers or how-to articles ... it's never been more than 60% right on anything I've asked it for help with

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Wild_Swimmingpool@reddit

Exactly, you need to keep them in their place. So many people putting please and thank you into prompts. Im over here with “the beatings will continue until morale improves” energy. Get to work clanker earn that water ration.

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Pyrostasis@reddit

Don't forget to guilt trip and gaslight your AI. I find it works better that way.

I have mine sort of half way between smegol from lord of the rings and the huntchback of notre dome.

"Summarize this for me"

"Yessss Masssster"

*summarizes**

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Mackerdaymia@reddit

Oh man, not just Defender/Purview but everything Entra and Intune in general. The amount of times MS hides some function in a new page/view. LLMs are great at finding that info in a few seconds and save you the hassle.

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SvendG@reddit

I gave up on using AI for just that purpose it seems stuck on old information all the time, and these cloud systems and MDMs changed settings around all the time. I tried gemini Pro multiple times for Google Workspace (asuming google would handle changes in it's own product best) and I always end up in some kind of loop with outdated information.

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Practical_Shower3905@reddit

Yeah, the trick is to send it a screenshot of the menu you're on.

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asmiggs@reddit

or link to the docs, if the company is funding a subscription and infrastructure you should have a MCP server for AI to validate it's answers against. The first thing I would do if I was required to use AI is submit a costed design for best practice infrastructure to validate outputs for your chosen technology. AI can hallucinate but you can mitigate that so you might as well give it the both barrels when it comes to best practice.

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Kuipyr@reddit

I like to make up random fantasies like saying this script is going to be deployed to the entire galactic fleet and if it screws up I’m going to get shot into a blackhole.

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graph_worlok@reddit

Not just me then? 🤣

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ihaxr@reddit

Yeah okay I'll be stealing this idea from now on.

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shahataman@reddit

It’s beautiful

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Practical_Shower3905@reddit

gif

Based.

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Disorderly_Chaos@reddit

Yeah. I was flabbergasted that it was able to find the fix for an antiquated badging system, showing me the exact page of an older manual.

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Ark161@reddit (OP)

Yeah, the issue is that most app support lay on a seperate team; massive F100 company, and they segment like that. I would probably get a talking to for stepping on toes. As for the gaslighting/guilt tripping, 100%. I use that tactic in my own models. I appreciate the feedback!

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dlongwing@reddit

Responses to every email from whoever told you to start using AI.

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Fallingdamage@reddit

In 1200 words or more.

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TopherBrink19@reddit

I just keep telling my boss that A.I. use goes against my religion.

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therankin@reddit

But R.E.M. use suggests losing my religion.

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igiveupmakinganame@reddit

i use it to write my powershell scripts.

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tamtamdanseren@reddit

anything powershell it can write faster than I can type.

"Give me a list of people who don't have phone 2FA that matches what we have on file in their mobile phone field" output as a csv but also as a nice html file I can print for my next meeting with leadership.

Powerpoints and other stuff it can also do, theming and all.

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Intelligent-Pause260@reddit

Start wasting as many tokens as possible. Run up a huge bill. Tell it to count to 1 million. Employers need to start feeling the hurt when their AI bill comes due and realize that humans are still the cheaper and better option. Malicious compliance will set us all free.

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wild-hectare@reddit

this is the only correct answer....they are counting tokens, not output

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khymbote@reddit

I use it to read error logs and tell me what’s going on while I look at other things.

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differenit@reddit

Quite a few colleagues are asking copilot to rewrite messages/emails to sound polite and professional before hitting send .. I am also using it for forcing other teams to look into their own product issues rather than always blaming infrastructure

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bucuracak@reddit

We live in a world that quantity matters more than quality unfortunately. Thus I try to use.AI to speed things up and if I mess up everything, I have a good cop out and people are queit ok with this

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CraftyPancake@reddit

So use it? It vastly speeds up how fast you can script things and make your life easier

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Ark161@reddit (OP)

I intend to, I am just struggling to think of meaningful ways to use it that arent just fluff.

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bosconet@reddit

Start wit the fluff, you will figure out better uses over time

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ConstructionSafe2814@reddit

As a non proficient scripting guy, my scripts usually fail, syntax error or so. Or wrong quoting. Regexes can become unreadable very quickly for my brain. I supply the relevant part of my code, together with the error/output of the script. AI finds the single quote in less than 10 seconds. Where I have to figure out why even it doesn't work.

Or stuff like if [ requires a space before/after and I forgot once again to do so. Hard to spot for me, not for AI.

I treat it as a colleague I don't fully trust but ask his/her opinion or alternative approach.

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CraftyPancake@reddit

You’re at the “I don’t know what I can do with it” stage

Throw any damn task you have, that is repetitive or boring or just needs documented at it. Gotta experiment to really see.

you can build entire dashboards from scratch in hours instead of days. Monitoring this and that, collating information from multiple sources, alerting you to events or exploits in the news.

The things you build don’t need to utilise AI at runtime, they can be normal software that was simply built with AI.

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Ark161@reddit (OP)

I guess that is really where I am at with it. Like, I have spent a LOT of time streamlining processes to be as effective as I can make them, so of course i'm like, "......okay......where do I use this thing when everything already just kind of falls into play?".

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braliao@reddit

Have you talked to AI, describe what you setup, and ask it for improvement?

Maybe it will surprise you

I am going to be blunt here - you think too highly of your own work.

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CraftyPancake@reddit

I’m about 1-2 months ahead of you - exact same situation. Embrace it and use it as a chance to turbocharge your capabilities. Create a Teams group or whatever to share what everyone is working on.

I did that and a lot of times we all go “shit.. didn’t think of that”

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DB-CooperOnTheBeach@reddit

Log file analysis or other dashboards (I paste in esxtop or perf charts from VMware or storage array data to get a snapshot of what's going on) build regex patterns, have it outline the steps involved in setting something up (eg, highly available nfs gateway servers, load balancing with vrrp, etc)

I spend 40% of my time using it to analyze stuff or write a simple bash script or ansible playbook

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AegorBlake@reddit

I have it edit my emails and find documentation.

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stocktradernoob@reddit

It sounds like a dumb request/command, but interpret it charitably. They’re saying (and it’s true up and down the chain so everyone is feeling it) “if you don’t learn how to use AI to make you able to do a lot more in the same amount of time, or to r same stuff in a lot less time freeing you up to do other thing, you’re going to be obsolete or at least replaceable, so we’re willing to invest in you gaining the skills to leverage AI tools…”

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ChisomR@reddit

Maybe you use it to analyze long files

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Mental_Beginning_698@reddit

So weird how quickly things evolved. I quit because I didn't want to deal with the everlasting infra issues that would end up being storage or DPU issues. So glad I did watching this shit show from the bleachers. I got into banking and funding short term loans and considering doing a 24 hour rescue service of cables PSU transceivers etc.

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spaaackle@reddit

OK - not a sysadmin, I have a software engineering background and manage a team of engineers. I'm at a company that isn't "Tech forward". They thing we're an IT company because we need "servers" to take orders (thats as technical as leadership gets here). So, we get the similar directive - "Use AI!".

First, AI isn't a magic robot that does all your work perfectly. If you're at a place that is frenetic or disorganized, then you'll just do frenetic and disorganized stuff quicker. Congrats?

Second, here's the magic u/spaaackle analogy. 50 years ago, Spaaackle's Spec-Houses specialized in building homes and we had a dedicated crew to build houses. We had 10 people, were OK at what we did, and managed to build 1 house every 6 months. Then, the foreman shows up with a device in his hand. Guys, this thing is apparently called a "screw gun", you can drive screws into wood way quicker and your hands never get tired. We're going to try these out.

Spaaackle's Spec-Houses has a choice to make. Do we now say "Terrific, I only need half the guys I have currently, I can save money" and build 1 house every 6 months cheaper? Or, do we now say "We are staffed up, we can build 2-3 houses in the time we spent building one.. potentially tripling profits."

That choice isn't yours alone. You may be at a company looking to be cheap, or be aggressive.. or not really know. Some of this is "wild west" territory.. not everyone in the 1800's understood the importance of mining for gold or striking oil. However, you should view AI as a tool. It should help you perform your tasks quicker and easier whenever you can.

Why? Well.. why not? What if you had a co-worker assigned to you at all hours that can check your email, keep task lists, review your work, execute your scripts, take notes, research complex tasks, analyze trends, etc.

So, use AI. Yes, just.. go use it. What does "Use AI" mean? That's up to you, "Use AI" of course is like saying "go use the internet".. thats too dang broad. We've learned that if we want medical advice we use WebMD and not Reddit. If we want to troll a software engineer, we use Reddit and not WebMD. "AI" is the same, there are differences between Claude, ChatGPT, grok, Microsoft Copilot, Github Copilot, etc. So.. go find the tooling that meets your needs. Need to analyze Excel documents and build a powerpoint.. Microsoft Copilot may be your best best. Need to write a script to manage your network devices but aren't super comfortable with code? Github Copilot may be your best bet to prompt engineer your way through it. And so on..

Embrace using AI, make AI work for what you are trying to do. Don't assume you can use a hammer to drive in screws, realize you need to drive screws and find a screwdriver.

HTH

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dataBlockerCable@reddit

We've been directed to do the same with copilot and the number of infrastructure issues have steadily risen...I'm sure there's no correlation.

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dub_starr@reddit

its easy to find uses, once you get a hold of what it can do, especially once you know how it will be / can be integrated in your environment. shoot, even if its just set up as a technical writer to do all of your documentation on each pull request. throw all your tech debt at it, have it organize and catagorize, and have it give suggestions which it can then implement, or help you implement. Just think of it as having a junior that you can pass off tasks to

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kentrak@reddit

One way to look at this is you're like the holdoutninnthebofficenusingnthe type writing being told you're going to have to use a computer, and you don't see the benefit of it over your trusty typewriter you've been using for years. There are certainly ways to switch to using a computer that don't take advantage of most the benefits and just feel like extra steps. You'll be much happier if that's not you, and you find the places you get genuine value out of the new tool and process.

Do you have small scripts or programs you've wanted to write that you know exactly how you'd do but the implementation and testing takes more time than you have or want to spend? AI is great at taking you enumerated spec for exactly what you would do and pumping out an implementation and even some tests. Let it help with the simple stuff that just takes time or that you don't want to hand to a junior because you know exactly what you want and communicating that is almost as much effort as doing it, and allow yourself to focus on the exploratory things that actually need your experience.

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BamaTony64@reddit

The only reason you resist using it is that you have not used it enough. I use it for repetitive code, consuming and summarizing logs, looking for compatible components, and finding YouTube videos on anything from the highly technical to how to build a better bird house.

It can be a lot of fun and also very useful.

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hypnoticlife@reddit

Once you use it for a while you’ll discover where it works and doesn’t work. It really is useful in many situations.

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PositiveBubbles@reddit

I use it as a way to help with drafting communication while telling it how I feel so it can help me take a step back and break stuff down.

It's easy to be frustrated in this industry, whether it be direct costumers, colleagues, vendors, third parties or something just doesn't work work.

Sometimes also use it to query pros and cons of an architectural design or idea.

Obviously sanitise important info but its good to even ask for content to reference.

People who are unsure about AI need to treat it as a form of research and ask the right questions which is the newer way of being able to google.

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AstralVenture@reddit

The company I work for doesn’t even service any of the Admin portals.

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JamesRustl3r@reddit

This isn't what "getting something off your chest" means.

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JerryRiceOfOhio2@reddit

i was told i have to use AI. it's on my yearly goals. I'm not doing it. not sure what will happen at review time, but I'll be damned if i replace myself with AI

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19610taw3@reddit

Anylze log files

Copilot in emails

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discgman@reddit

You can program it to play death metal every time it picks up a error in a log file. Just a quick burst of music every 3 minutes.

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WestOpening1350@reddit

I felt the same. The best use I’ve found is Red Teaming my own code. Paste your PowerShell/Bash scripts and ask it to find edge cases or security holes. It’s decent at catching logic flaws in your scripts, which keeps your authority intact while technicality 'using' the tool management wants.

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Aim_Fire_Ready@reddit

“Sure, how do you want me to use it?”

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wintermute023@reddit

Lots of great suggestions in this thread, but some are performative, some are box ticking, some are massively useful. I think most miss the point.

What really matters is what the people telling you to use AI actually see. If the can see and interact with something that feels useful to the business, that will build you the trust and credibility they are actually looking for. This isn’t usually about “You must use AI” it’s more about “ can you adapt and change to new tools and new ways of working “.

If you register the trust and credibility signals early, they move on and let you do your job.

So in our situation, we built a “Service Intelligence System” that took signals from loosely coupled systems (service tickets, escalations, service logs, release and update data etc” and got the AI to match up trends across multiple signals and create a data backed output that highlights where to focus effort, what multi system trends, what patterns lead to what sort of escalations.

Senior management love it as it’s so ‘proactive’ and we find some of the signal concatenation very useful, and we keep updating it with small tweaks every now and again, and they leave us alone as we appear ahead of other teams in our adoption model.

It’s all optics.

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Gotrek6@reddit

USe it to craft all your email but remember to tell it to dumb it down to your level.

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SusAdmin42@reddit

You know… what’s stopping AI from completely replacing this role?

Once you have an orchestrator, the AI can do the rest, especially if you’re fully on Azure/AWS. Sysadmins may not disappear, but you’ll no longer need an entire team of them.

Interesting times.

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cdoublejj@reddit

i use it when googling stuff, i also wouldn't take such a mandate seriously. probably some other good suggestions here like the one for checking log files

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Nandulal@reddit

like, from the toilet? ;D

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Denver80211@reddit

Is it really that bad? I use it all the time and it's incredibly helpful.

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Aware-Owl4346@reddit

You're being told to use it, but not specifically how?

Would they even be able to verify you're using it? Just tell them your procedures and documentation are generated with AI.

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Lucky__Flamingo@reddit

Have you tried using it to document your legacy codebase? Game changing.

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jenkstom@reddit

I'm not an AS400 guy, but I was made responsible for support on one. Even though we had some smart folks who do know AS400 (yeah, I know, IBM i) I had great results just pasting screenshots into google gemini. I didn't even have to convert it to text first. I'd wind up with step by step instructions for fixing it. And if I ran into trouble usually another screenshot or two got me there. It was also really good at creating runbooks.

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gafftapes20@reddit

I use GitHub copilot on a daily basis in my vscode ide. You can also use Claude or ChatGPT codex for the same thing. I have a code review tool that check for quality and adherence to standards, and another one that helps with vulnerability fixes. This all requires humans to review and deploy changes. Tools we use are sonarqube, and GitHub Code Security.

I use ai often when doing initial architecture of a project or system I’m designing. It helps with the spec writing and what components are required. It functions essentially as a second set of eyes to help me from missing things. I have specialized chat bots with custom skills and instruction sets configured in my chat ai instance. When I’m busy, and need to respond to a ticket I can write a quick response and have ai polish it up so I can get back to work.

I work in a fairly small it department and have a pretty wide requirement for knowledge including my primary role as a programmer and infrastructure engineer, so AI is essential in helping me keep on top of our sprawling toolset.

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non-descript_com@reddit

I've used Copilot (sub from work) to summarize meetings, write a project plan, and document other stuff. Yes, it needs guidance and tweaking, but I "talk" to it like I would a small child with good writing style..

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enforce1@reddit

There are a variety of things that AI is very good at. Do not be a luddite.

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WizardsOfXanthus@reddit

My boss, who is a VP, says he uses it to tone down he emails. He's a very nice guy, knows his stuff, but is very blunt. Apparently that has offended some people. So he types his email as usual, throws it into AI and has it spit it back out in a neutral tone.

I use it when diagnosing errors in my SSIS environments. I'm not a developer, but I need to keep our 600+ jobs running, and if there are errors I don't quite understand, I throw it into AI to try and diagnose the issue, get some details out of it, then I will write the developer to let the know there was an error and what I believe is causing the issue. So far, AI has been right each and every time, and the dev thanked me for getting the level of detail I did for them. They also know I use AI for this, but still, sometimes there is an art to the way you need to "speak" to it.

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mkmrproper@reddit

Do companies track users to see what queries they are running to evaluate their employees?

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perth_girl-V@reddit

I use AI for everything

Its awesome and haters Gunnar hate

Yes it makes mistakes yes you still need to know what your doing so you can supervise the AI output

Its beast once you reaply get it going

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vabello@reddit

I have to agree here. Also, laying down rules for AI will help prevent mistakes. If you know when and how to leverage it, it can make you highly productive.

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bubbaganoush79@reddit

Create an agent (or use the existing prompt coach agent in Copilot) to generate every prompt for you. If you have to use LLMs as much as possible, might as well use it twice for every use case. If they're going to force you to use the LLM, then they get LLM inception.

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Speeddymon@reddit

Tell it to run your pre commit hooks and analyze the issue when a check fails. If your hooks have good linting and vulnerability scanning tools, it can find and fix the problem

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numtini@reddit

A solution in search of a problem.

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_SundayNightDrive@reddit

Basically glorified search engines directly pointing at things like Microsoft's and UniFi's tech articles to help me track down what I'm looking for quicker.

Claude also gets me the Braves scores.

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wreckeur@reddit

I'm planning on retiring in four years. I'm using AI (Gemini - we're a Google Apps for EDU domain) to help write knowledge docs for my replacement. It generates them, then I edit/update. Much faster than writing them from scratch.

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spazmo_warrior@reddit

Look, I know this seems like a weird thing to complain about, but a pipe’s been backing up and I gotta snake it out. My foreman walked up to me today and said, plain as day, I’m gonna start using one of them fancy new pipe inspection cameras. No “why,” no “here’s the plan” — just use the camera, end of discussion. Everything from scoping out clogs to running full diagnostic crawls on the main line. Fine. Sure. Whatever you say, boss. But here’s where I’m standing in the crawlspace scratching my head: I’ve been snaking drains and sweating copper for twenty years with nothing but my hands, a torch, and hard-won calluses. My current toolkit works just fine. The pipes flow. The customers are happy. Nobody’s ankle-deep in sewage on my watch. So where exactly does the magic camera fit when half my problems aren’t bad pipes — they’re bad people who keep flushing baby wipes and calling it someone else’s fault? Could I use it to pre-screen service calls so I’m not rolling a truck for something that’s just a slow aerator? Sure. Could I use it to map out repetitive drain layouts and cut my rough-in time? Maybe. Could I use it to route the right jobs to the right guys instead of me catching everything because nobody else wants to touch a grease trap? Absolutely — but that’s a scheduling problem, not a camera problem, and it only works if the other guys actually show up and follow the job sheet. Could I use it to write up estimates that don’t sound like I learned English from a pipe fitting catalog? I mean… yeah, probably. But here’s the thing, sweetheart: when I’m already running the tightest, cleanest jobsite on the crew, and everyone else keeps freestyling the installation and ignoring code — how in the name of sweated fittings is a new camera gonna fix that? The leak isn’t in my pipes. The leak is in the guys who won’t follow the blueprint. No amount of fancy tech patches a human-sized hole.

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jsand2@reddit

It truly makes me cringe to hear people who call themselves system admins complain about supporting systems like AI. It is literally our job title.

And sorry OP, you will never even come close to being as efficient as the AI is. It just isnt possible for humanity.

And as a system admin, you should know that supporting AI isnt putting you out of a job, its your new job.

I am just glad to know that I dont work with admins like this. I enjoy working with tech forward companies and dont have room on my team for those who wish to remain cavemen.

I really do expect more from people who claim to be system admins.

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reader4567890@reddit

There's so many legitimate use cases for using it that will 100% make your life easier.

Assuming you're a knowledgeable and seasoned IT vet, you can do so much with AI. You're in the privileged position of being able to understand whether the output is shit or not, and use that appropriately.

If you don't use it to your advantage, then those starting out in IT absolutely will (and won't have the same depth of knowledge you start with).

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TopHigh_Field2K@reddit

I started using Copilot a while ago to analyze compatibility before applying upgrades to VMware, Cisco UCS, NetApp and PURE. Surprisingly has been very handy finding mismatches firmware and drivers once I provide the data to analyze. I also use AI to provide performance reports once I provide the data. This process takes now a couple of minutes and not days.

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swz@reddit

People who refuse to use AI are like the construction worker that likes to brag about working 90 hour weeks.

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nroach44@reddit

I spend more time helping my co-workers fix their hallucinated scripts than it would take me to write it with them.

I can write emails fine, I can write scripts quickly enough, I can't put customer data into it, so what can I do with it? I don't have trouble finding documentation or hell, reading the source code to figure out what's going on.

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itishowitisanditbad@reddit

People used to brag about never googling anything too.

Its the same thing. Some people will figure out the new tools and some won't, some will resist and others will overly rely upon.

Genuinely, people used to brag about not having to google things.

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Ark161@reddit (OP)

lol yeah, it was such a strange thing to hear from people. My reaction was always, "Weird flex, but okay...". Having a fountain of knowledge at your disposal and it being more accessible than ever....then letting something like pride prevent you from using it.....flipping madness right there.

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Ark161@reddit (OP)

im not refusing to use it? I am asking a community on how they have implemented AI in their roles because people out here have been around the block longer than I have. I run my own models and agents. I have scripted a LOT of work out of our jobs already. 90% of my job difficulty is people going off script and pulling politics/feelings into process/policy.

Trust me, I do enjoy cracking the occassional "WORKIN 80 HOUR WEEKS IN MY FORD PICKUP. YOU GOT SOFT HANDS BROTHER! GOTTA GET YOU SOME OF THEM CARHARTS AND PUT THE RUBBER TO THE ROAD!" when some of my coworkers get really tryhard.

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Normal_Choice9322@reddit

I mean if you aren't using it already you fail

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ryncewynd@reddit

I'm a dev trying to setup some linux servers / gateways / firewalls / proxies and networking stuff.

I'm super heavily relying on ChatGPT and it's helping me so much.

Whatever guide or documentation I use, something goes wrong every 5min with a command. Same with ChatGPT but at least I can ask it to explain things to me properly instead of searching on forums or getting "rtfm" responses from stackoverflow or whatever.

I grind away on GPT until my VM finally gets working, then I start a fresh VM and document the whole process now that I've ironed out all the kinks.

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nousername1244@reddit

Easiest way is don’t overthink it, use it for small wins (scripts, docs, summaries....) and call it a day. Nobody’s expecting you to reinvent your workflow overnight.

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Plenty-Wonder6092@reddit

If you're not already using AI you're very behind.

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ecto1a2003@reddit

Tell it to look busy

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ansibleloop@reddit

Claude code with the caveman extension is top tier

The fact that it can use the azure CLI and kubectl to diagnose issues or find information is excellent

I'm migrating loads of pipelines at the moment and it's making it effortless

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geekywarrior@reddit

High level research is a good one. Just talk over your processes and see if it suggests improvements.

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sdeptnoob1@reddit

Logs, scripts, custom tools of you got anthropic and a bunch of token. Last one may get you brownie points lol. Just remember security as I can't trust it for that.

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Mike22april@reddit

Did your boss already tell you which AI you must use? All AI are created equal, some AI are just more equal than others ... at certain rasks

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MaTOntes@reddit

Use it to broaden your knowledge. Use it to write automation scripts in seconds. Use it to teach you about topics. Use it to research. Use it to have a go at the laundry list of things that you know you should get around to but don't have time.

You have a big smart creative brain. Using your big smart brain to slap your fingers on a keyboard writing monotonous non-creative drudgery is a waste.

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graph_worlok@reddit

Don’t use it to communicate with people. It comes off as obviously AI written, content free slop.

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Exact-Account-1025@reddit

As you have already been told, use it for logs, that's a good start

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Og-Morrow@reddit

Why would want to use AI? Basic example is logs.

Look through shit tones logs, find the issue I go solve the issue.

It’s a good tool to use it! Why make life harder.

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poizone68@reddit

If nothing else, having it write my annual performance review and goals sounds like a good use :) Anything that involves a lot of text is probably going to be useful to throw at AI, so log files and trend analysis should be a safe bet. Perhaps even going through the cloud billing to see exactly how we're being overcharged is a good one too, so FinOps could be another great area.

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GroteGlon@reddit

If you still haven't found uses for AI that's pretty much on you.

Have it script something, and just fix the couple minor errors; Analyze logs; make documentation from whatever bullshit notes you made; make user manuals (just check if it's correct). There's tons of things like this where it can just save a bunch of time

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wrosecrans@reddit

At this point, I am so burned out by the AI hype cycle that I'd just say no and invite them to fire me for it if they really cared.

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greenstarthree@reddit

Entertainment purposes, obviously!

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BlueHatBrit@reddit

Basically every tool out there now has some AI offering. Use this as a chance to get something through the door that you've wanted for a while but haven't had the political weight to get in.

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UninvestedCuriosity@reddit

Someone's trying to justify their expense account I bet.

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Hairy-Link-8615@reddit

I do understand some what.

I the other way around bottom senior engineer so I use it primarily in 3 ways.

Learning tool Email summary tool / writing tool. Analytics tool, logs script writing.

Yesterday I was finishing setting up exclaimer. Setting up chrome flex os Hunting down an expired enterprise app secret Also used AI to hunt down and summarise 20 emails relating to a side project that never quiet makes it over the last 4 years. Summarise that into a solution document that covered challanages / solutions.

Today continuing the flex os project ( of which I took all 150 device settings and got IA to format all the settings in a table colour then based on category)

& DKIM email investigation

Working at a msp. So anything that reduces cognitive load. Hope that helps

The only thing I need AI for is replacing grammarly. It's just helpful for rest.

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stebswahili@reddit

I’m in a sales-adjacent role. My most common uses are as a brainstorming assistant and researching topics I’m not as skilled in.

I’ve also started setting up notebooks for specific projects or clients to limit what Copilot sees/can reference. One use case that could be helpful in your role is a notebook dedicated to the creation of SOPs, documentation, and checklists.

If you aren’t an expert at project management, you could have a notebook dedicated to developing project plans or tracking the issues you encounter each time. Your AI could then assist in spotting problems that seem insignificant at the time but crop up consistently. I also use AI frequently to analyze ticket data. The analysis isn’t perfect, but it saves me a ton of time finding potential trends to look at more closely and has helped us uncover a few recurring issues we may have otherwise missed.

Not sure if this would apply to you, as usually the sysadmins that struggle with this can’t write worth a damn (and you clearly can), but a lot of sysadmins struggle to get leadership from other business units to get behind IT strategy, understand the value of good IT, be engaged during major projects, and appreciate the role IT plays in their success. AI is no life coach, but it can show you strategies that can help you become a more effective leader.

Oh and it can help you do your shopping a lot faster and with some oversight can help build reports for when you need to compare a few solutions and convince the bosses the one you like makes the most sense.

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Einaiden@reddit

I used it to write up my last annual review, it included all the fancy HR gobbledygook and it was probably the longest most detailed annual review I've ever "written".

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AdministrativeFile78@reddit

whats the problem? just do your job and install whatever terminal based tooling they want and use ai when it makes sense. you are in tech and ai is a great tool

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lotekjunky@reddit

make a dashboard for triaging users, servers, apps , sites etc.

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FarToe1@reddit

I find it excellent as triage.

Throw a bunch of logs at a LLM and it'll instantly hone in on the problem. Sometimes its solutions are still off-base, and they get more so the deeper you go - but for first level skim it's sped up my diagnosis a lot.

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Dabnician@reddit

I use ai to troubleshoot logs, config files (sigh, yes without credentials because i know some "smart ass" sysmin is going to be like i HoPe YoU dOn'T durrrrr).

And copilot to draft emails that sound professional with minimal typing.

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redditticktock@reddit

Use AI to find every ingress point for data into you network and scan it for malware binaries and scan text for malicious code. Generate reports about everything that AI sees and does and publish it every week. The hacks we see this year are going to go through the roof.

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ck17350@reddit

Great news! There’s no such thing as AI, so you’re off the hook. Now if they mandate using ML, well then you might be screwed. I suspect being pedantic isn’t actually going to work with your bosses, but you don’t know until you try.

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kagato87@reddit

Grab Kiro and sick it on some of your automations. It'll burn tokens and run up costs quick enough, and you know that old saying about a broken clock...

AI isn't too bad for triaging tickets, and can be useful for tweaking your automations. DO NOT let it do the work though. Inspect every line, take every triage with a grain of salt, and do not let it actually perform steps that you could write an automation for. It is, by design, non-deterministic, and you need reliable, consistent results.

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ninesalmon@reddit

I might get dunked on here on this sub and I will preface this by saying AI is not a full blown problem solver but at this point any professional that hasn’t figured out how to use it to be more efficient in even just some small areas i do hold a negative bias towards.

I am director level but the number of times I see an email thread I get added to that I literally just dump into Gemini pro for ideas and get a lot of good ones - NOT straight answers but leads to look at - is still silly to me in 2026. And it’s always the guys that do good work, but have been stuck on their positions for a decade or longer. They don’t want to escape the google search and forum browse to get problem solving ideas when at this point it’s horribly inefficient.

Many will disagree with me but the people I see breaking out in their roles - they’re all using AI in some way. The guys stuck doing the same thing forever are the ones resisting and I do judge it.

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GinormousHippo458@reddit

Have fun training the AI - your improved future replacement with no need of an H1B either. And he'll even answer that password reset call at 4AM very happily.

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pizzacake15@reddit

Use it to draft a response to your boss

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Legionof1@reddit

I had it whip up a basic flask app dashboard to monitor some endpoints, I had a running dashboard with a few bells and whistles in under an hour of tweaking… makes me sick how good it is… but now I have code no one knows how to maintain.

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Legal_Situation@reddit

I've also considered using it to generate documentation in proper formats based on whatever ticketing is completed.

If you have escalation paths for tickets getting sent to you, maybe serving runbooks for items that can already be completed by the escalating team might be helpful?

I've not had the chance to implement any of these, but they've been some cases where I think there could be some benefit, though admittedly accuracy still concerns me.

Log analysis for break/fix tickets could be handy if that comes up for your team. Not that you have to use it, but it could possibly help point people in the right direction.

I do use it for some light data analysis where precision doesn't really matter much, but I find it hard to trust the output generally.

I've found it okay for some light scripting (this was a personal test of ollama) that gave me a python script that looked halfway workable.

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Ark161@reddit (OP)

Ticket arbitration is one of my goals to clear with it. Right now, my team is kind of a catch all. On paper, we are supposed to be infrastructure only. We host the servers, we rack'em , build them out, make the VMs, make the playground, and then apps team can do whatever the hell they want with their plot of land.

My hang up is that we have a vast ITSM solution that covers all of this, but people let feelings override workflow/process, so it just doesnt cross the finish line.

I apprecaite you taking the time to respond. Thank you

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hops_on_hops@reddit

Scripts with iteration and checking along the way.

I also feed it existing scripts and have it add comments that expain function. Also have it add best practice things like adding variables, logs, and error checks.

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justaguyonthebus@reddit

Use it to auto request clarifying details on tickets and email requests.

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EuroLegend23@reddit

You can tell it to not run off-script. You can define its standards. (Look into copilot instruction files). You can use it stupid repetitive tasks, “compare these two files and show me all differences”. It’s great at stuff like that.

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toadfreak@reddit

If you are struggling to find a use case for AI in your role, and are being asked to do so, use the AI to do all of this. Give the AI your (scrubbed) scripts and ask it for ideas to make them better. Give it your (also scrubbed) text based configs and ask for suggestions to improve. If suggestions are unclear or not what you are looking for, guide the AI to areas of personal interest to get better suggestions. Have it create systems documentation for you. A DR plan. Pull (insert critical app name) logs and feed all that in, and ask questions about the data you have fed in there. Good luck. I bet once you get into it you are going to see the value. Come back and tell us.

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Zolty@reddit

Why is it any different than any other piece of tech you’ve learned ?

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amohakam@reddit

A perspective from a different domain:

Checklist Manifesto - is a telling real example of embracing change.

Dr. Gawandale observes the processes of using check lists by airlines before flight takeoff as a way to reduce accidents.

He wondered why surgeons cannot follow check lists before surgery to reduce patient deaths. Simple idea, but most surgeons felt they didn’t need checklists. They already what to do. After all they were the experts. Some were insulted that they were being asked to follow check lists.

But today, every surgeon uses a check list. This is now part of SOP.

Some things to consider:

Code review all old and new shell scripts for optimizations and security vulnerabilities. Most LLMs are really good across wide array of technical domains.
Setup Security Log Parsing agents to alert on suspicious logs with recommendations impossible mitigation. Setup security nest practices guides for end users.
Use Azure/relevant agents by cloud providers to check tenants for permission leakage. Eg: Do user accounts, groups have unnecessarily wide open permissions
Look to automate help desk tickets by setting up workflows by setting up answers to 80% of common end user questions.

As most know, LLMs are probabilistic and we are used to deterministic flows. How do we add guard rails to ensure a probabilistic system can still deliver a superior end user experience.

It’s not a solution for everything, it does work for some use cases quite well,

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gnordli@reddit

I just started using Claude regularly now. There are a few things I like about it. I am a jack of all trades. If I just paste in a log, it parses and presents the options. I know what I am looking for, but sometimes I haven't seen this log format for months, which saves me time getting up to speed again. Zeek log parsing is like magic.

It teaches me different ways of doing things. I have been doing the same thing for years and sometimes I am not current on the product. I am learning more.

Documentation is better. When I am finished working on something. It can ask it to write a summary and then I can paste it into a wiki or ticket.

Script writing can be better. I was trying to do most of my powershell scripting on a Linux desktop, but it had issues with it. I switched to a regular windows desktop and it worked much better. It still annoys me that we need to go through several iterations before it gets something that actually works.

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Opposite_Bag_7434@reddit

We are being pushed into it as well. So it’s about being smart and realizing that AI can, and does, make mistakes. There are a myriad of ways Ai is leading to leaked information so serious guardrails are very important.

I am finding it can be a useful thought partner. Although more often I am discovering the shortcomings of the guidance it gives.

I did create a cool kb article in like 5 seconds today, another minute to point out where its assumptions were wrong, and I had a good final draft. Total time literally 5 minutes. My team seems to hate creating detailed well formatted documentation so it can be a help here.

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redyellowblue5031@reddit

I’ve had good results if I feed it the documentation for a product and ask how to do something. If it’s not correct, it’s usually at least found the right spot for me to dig deeper.

I also find it has a way of forcing you to accurately break down your problem into its core pieces. By the time you do that you may already be most of the way to a solution but that’s sort of valuable in itself.

Be careful with it though, they all seem to “learn” how you communicate, so even when you try to avoid it, it’ll often find a way to be patronizing.

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QuietlyJudgingYouu@reddit

Use it to analyze log files. It's a time saver.

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JeremyLC@reddit

Do you have to use it for written communication, or for actual tasks? You could, for example, have an AI agent routinely interrogate switch and router configurations and compare them to your DCIM (which I’m sure you have, and keep updated, right?) and either report on discrepancies, or update the DCIM to reflect as-built changes . . . Without having to write a lot of code to do it. They’re really good at pattern recognition, you could have an AI agent perform network and system monitoring and perform analyses that traditional monitor cannot. You could have it do threat monitoring or log analysis. You can have it do threat modeling and even penetration and security testing. (Hello Horizon AI) You can have it analyze configuration files and source code. There are a number of potential uses that aren’t just pointless use-it-because-it’s-there uses. You should definitely have safeguards around it, and take precautions not to leak data into it, though.

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Ark161@reddit (OP)

not explicitly, it is kind of an open thing with the cavaet of "we are watching what the hell you are doing btw". The big issue im running into is meaningful application while knowing leadership goes off-script way too much to coordinate something that has any chance of repeatability. Thank you for sharing your thoughts and suggestions. It gives me quite a bit to ponder.

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kilkor@reddit

You sound like you already have some ideas of what you might use it for. It can help with all of that and more. However effective you might be, if you were pitted against a copy of yourself that could use AI agents well, the copy of yourself would be more efficient in the long run.

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Ark161@reddit (OP)

oh for sure. I am not knocking on AI use. I just struggle to thing of meaningful application. I think my biggest struggle is that a lot of other teams like to go off script and become "not very data driven". So I struggle with the application more so than the concept.

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XiuOtr@reddit

What service are you in?

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Ark161@reddit (OP)

without getting into a whole lot of detail, it is kind of like being an MSP, but IaaS for internal use. Im brainstorming ideas to try and be more coordinated with my approach; rather than "YOLO, WE BALL". Mostly it is hosting and providing infrastructure in the purest sense of the word. However with corporate red tape, I am super limited with what I can/can't do. So im just putting feelers out.

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captnconnman@reddit

I actually use it all the time to write scripts, and I’d say it gets it right about 80-90% of the time. Just a high enough failure rate where I still have to check it, and make sure the logic works (and make sure it didn’t hallucinate a class or something…), but it’s probably saved me dozens of hours of debugging to make sure my from-scratch or “modified from Stack Overflow” script was functioning properly

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longlurcker@reddit

YouTube, copilot, connected to wsl, in agent mode