I'm gonna scream
-
"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.
"LLMs can be fantastic if you’re using them to do something that you mostly understand. If you’re familiar enough with a problem space to understand the common approaches used to solve it, and you know the subject area well enough to spot the inevitable LLM hallucinations and confabulations, and you understand the task at hand well enough to steer the LLM away from dead-ends and to stop it from re-inventing the wheel, and you have the means to confirm the LLM’s output, then these tools are, frankly, kind of amazing."
If, and, if, and. So many caveats. So if you ignore *the numerous problems*, it is *kind of* amazing. Uh huh. That's what we are supposed to take away from this.
Somehow "amazing" is not the descriptor I would use for something that behaves like this.
-
"LLMs can be fantastic if you’re using them to do something that you mostly understand. If you’re familiar enough with a problem space to understand the common approaches used to solve it, and you know the subject area well enough to spot the inevitable LLM hallucinations and confabulations, and you understand the task at hand well enough to steer the LLM away from dead-ends and to stop it from re-inventing the wheel, and you have the means to confirm the LLM’s output, then these tools are, frankly, kind of amazing."
If, and, if, and. So many caveats. So if you ignore *the numerous problems*, it is *kind of* amazing. Uh huh. That's what we are supposed to take away from this.
Somehow "amazing" is not the descriptor I would use for something that behaves like this.
@packetcat I can't stomach reading the whole article, but the bits you're quoting and the surrounding text I could read feel like something out of The Onion.
-
"LLMs can be fantastic if you’re using them to do something that you mostly understand. If you’re familiar enough with a problem space to understand the common approaches used to solve it, and you know the subject area well enough to spot the inevitable LLM hallucinations and confabulations, and you understand the task at hand well enough to steer the LLM away from dead-ends and to stop it from re-inventing the wheel, and you have the means to confirm the LLM’s output, then these tools are, frankly, kind of amazing."
If, and, if, and. So many caveats. So if you ignore *the numerous problems*, it is *kind of* amazing. Uh huh. That's what we are supposed to take away from this.
Somehow "amazing" is not the descriptor I would use for something that behaves like this.
"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.
-
"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.
@packetcat skimmed it and my first thought was "existing tools almost did what you wanted? did you consider contributing new features to those tools instead of making a whole new one?"
-
"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.
-
@packetcat I find it mildly heartening that the top comments are critical
-
@packetcat This is so silly given all the tools that already do this...
-
"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.
-
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.
-
@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.
-
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.
-
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
-
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.
-
@packetcat This is a very very good post.
@noracodes thank you!
-
@packetcat Okay to share with an anti-AI Signal group?
-
@packetcat Okay to share with an anti-AI Signal group?
@aroacemagicalnerd yes, go ahead!
-
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.
-
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.
-
"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
-
@packetcat i'm so tired of the word "agentic" lol
@maple
same here
