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I saw this in my feed reader and thought that somehow a Benj Edwards post had gotten past my RSS feed filters but no, it's Lee
jesus motherfucking christ
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
"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.
"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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I sense the undercurrent of a very individualist perspective here. A lone wolf sysadmin against the Big Bad Problem solving the problem at great cost to oneself and to the world around them.
It is honestly very American but this isn't just an American thing, it is way more endemic than that in IT circles.
The only thing LLMs are good at is feeding one's ego, it will give sycophancy when what you needed was a helping hand and that's where the con finds its mark.
A good con works because it feeds on some sort of emotional desire and in this case the LLM fed on your desire to solve this issue all on your lonesome.
I think I'll compose this thread into a blog post because I'm still pissed off about it and I need to write more to process it.