I'm gonna scream
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"I am a better sysadmin than I was before agentic coding because now I can solve problems myself that I would have previously needed to hand off to someone else."
No, it didn't make you a better sysadmin. At best you are the same level of sysadmin you were before you did this. At worst, you regressed your problem solving skills.
Being a good sysadmin means knowing the limits of one's skills and knowledge. To be able to go, "okay, I can't figure this out, lemme ask another person for help". That is not something to be ashamed of or a mark of incompetence.
Did you ask someone else for help? Another sysadmin? Maybe a programmer friend to help with the colorizer? Go on IRC, forums, hell even Stack Overflow? A log colorizer is a solved problem.
I deal with cache invalidation issues in relation to WordPress sites and Cloudflare at my day job, and there other people like me who could have helped you with the underlying problem with caching you were trying to figure out.
Instead, you went about it the most roundabout, inefficient way possible and when the plagiarism machine gave you a colorizer, it was *you* that used your experience and knowledge to find the issue, not the LLM.
"Have you ever been stuck troubleshooting an intermittent issue? Something doesn’t work, you make a change, it suddenly starts working, then despite making no further changes, it randomly breaks again."
I run into situations like this all the time at $WORK and what I do is ask my coworkers to take a look and see if they have any ideas.
When I am deep into the weeds of solving a issue like this, I get tunnel-visioned into one particular perspective on the issue and getting past that involves other people with different perspectives and specializations coming in and going - "have you looked at $X? this sounds like a issue caused by $Y" and then going "oh huh I hadn't considered that."
And I usually end up learning something from that experience and that in turn makes me better at what I do in the future.
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@packetcat I find it mildly heartening that the top comments are critical
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@packetcat This is so silly given all the tools that already do this...
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"And I had fun doing these things, even as entire vast swaths of rainforest were lit on fire to power my agentic adventures."
If *this* is the conclusion you come to then you need to stop writing, go stare at a wall and contemplate the choices that brought you to this completely unhinged, abhorrent conclusion.
Instead, you published this publicly on a popular site.
@packetcat I thought you were making fun of them maybe trying to justify the energy usage of LLMS but that's a direct quote and holy shit that is so sociopathic. Why would anyone write that.
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see, like Lee I am a sysadmin who is bad at programming, always have been, I haven't written anything more than simple Bash and Python scripts
so I am the target demographic for this blog post and as such it is pissing me off *more* than your average programmer writing a post about how they vibe-coded a thing
@packetcat yeah, if you know python, you can just use rich to do this sort of scripting. You can also setup alloy to scrape your logs and then feed them into something like loki to aggregate them and store them long term and then view that as a datasource from grafana. It's way more worth it to actually learn how to write these sorts of things, because one day these LLMs won't be free or cheap anymore and you'll be unable to do anything for yourself.
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@packetcat Just imagine choosing to publish this sentence about having LLMs spit out all sorts of junk code: "And I had fun doing these things, even as entire vast swaths of rainforest were lit on fire to power my agentic adventures."
I suppose it's why he also compares himself to Emperor Palpatine. He enjoys knowingly doing harm.
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The blog post is written and published.
Sysadmin In The LLM Age
"You cannot vibe code your way into becoming a better sysadmin. Or better anything else for that matter."
https://nullrouted.space/2026/02/05/sysadmin-in-the-llm-age/
Boosts on this post are appreciated, thank you.
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The blog post is written and published.
Sysadmin In The LLM Age
"You cannot vibe code your way into becoming a better sysadmin. Or better anything else for that matter."
https://nullrouted.space/2026/02/05/sysadmin-in-the-llm-age/
Boosts on this post are appreciated, thank you.
I wrote this blog post this morning instead of starting a new book which is how you know I was really pissed off
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The blog post is written and published.
Sysadmin In The LLM Age
"You cannot vibe code your way into becoming a better sysadmin. Or better anything else for that matter."
https://nullrouted.space/2026/02/05/sysadmin-in-the-llm-age/
Boosts on this post are appreciated, thank you.
@packetcat This is a very very good post.
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@packetcat This is a very very good post.
@noracodes thank you!
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@packetcat Okay to share with an anti-AI Signal group?
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@packetcat Okay to share with an anti-AI Signal group?
@aroacemagicalnerd yes, go ahead!
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I wrote this blog post this morning instead of starting a new book which is how you know I was really pissed off
In a past iteration of the blog I used to write a lot more commentary on computer technology, in fact it was the primary topic.
OG mutuals may remember that my blog used to have a different name in the past, one with "tech" in the domain name.
Over the years as my interests diversified I started writing about different things and at a certain point I stopped writing about computer technology entirely.
That is partially because my interests are more varied now and I like to write about books more than I do computer technology. Reviewing books serves both as a way to practice my writing and analysis skills and also it is useful to other people, and in general it is a more pleasant thing to write about.
But also it is because everything I wanted to write about computer technology recently is a polemic of some kind or another, and that kind of writing while cathartic up to a certain point is exhausting, and also gets repetitive fast.
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The blog post is written and published.
Sysadmin In The LLM Age
"You cannot vibe code your way into becoming a better sysadmin. Or better anything else for that matter."
https://nullrouted.space/2026/02/05/sysadmin-in-the-llm-age/
Boosts on this post are appreciated, thank you.
"And I had fun doing these things, even as entire vast swaths of rainforest were lit on fire to power my agentic adventures."
Burn baby, burn.
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"And I had fun doing these things, even as entire vast swaths of rainforest were lit on fire to power my agentic adventures."
If *this* is the conclusion you come to then you need to stop writing, go stare at a wall and contemplate the choices that brought you to this completely unhinged, abhorrent conclusion.
Instead, you published this publicly on a popular site.
@packetcat i'm so tired of the word "agentic" lol
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@packetcat i'm so tired of the word "agentic" lol
@maple
same here -
In a past iteration of the blog I used to write a lot more commentary on computer technology, in fact it was the primary topic.
OG mutuals may remember that my blog used to have a different name in the past, one with "tech" in the domain name.
Over the years as my interests diversified I started writing about different things and at a certain point I stopped writing about computer technology entirely.
That is partially because my interests are more varied now and I like to write about books more than I do computer technology. Reviewing books serves both as a way to practice my writing and analysis skills and also it is useful to other people, and in general it is a more pleasant thing to write about.
But also it is because everything I wanted to write about computer technology recently is a polemic of some kind or another, and that kind of writing while cathartic up to a certain point is exhausting, and also gets repetitive fast.
That said, while I don't want to write too many blog posts like these, I do want my writing to reflect the times.
And the times are Bad. So it means polemics but I think there is a possibility for other things in a similar vein.
It feels weird to be stretching writing muscles I haven't used in a long time but also at the same time my writing has markedly improved in quality in the intervening years when I stopped commentating on such topics. So it all works out in balance.
I have another of these anti-LLM polemics percolating in my brain that I actually need to sit down and start writing. I keep worrying that its a little too abstract and vague but I think it will be effective nonetheless.
Considering this post as a practice run.
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