I'm gonna scream
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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.
@packetcat I find it mildly heartening that the top comments are critical
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@packetcat yeah this is infuriating.
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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 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.
@fancysandwiches Yeah, when I first read that bit I thought I was misreading and had to re-read it.
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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.
@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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@packetcat his replies in the comment section are pissing me off more than the article lol
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@packetcat his replies in the comment section are pissing me off more than the article lol
@barquq yeah which is why I didn't go too deep into the comments section lol
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@Ember Yeah agreed on that re: asking for help in toxic places
dealt with enough of that on mailing lists and IRC channels in my life
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"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 guess they are drunk on kool-aid
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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.
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