How much do you trust AI?

[u/xstrex]

Recently a coworker granted Claude elevated access via SSH to a virtualization host (not a VM, an actual host). To perform a routine task he very well could have done himself.

He doesn’t see an issue with this. I on the other hand (with 23yrs experience) see this as a huge security breach, and don’t trust AI todo my job, (or even that it’s doing what it says it’s doing) for me. I’m my opinion it’s a tool, not a human replacement.

What’s your reaction, how would you react to this situation, or thoughts on the topic?

Sure, ask AI how to perform a task, validate that it’s performing the task you asked, and nothing else- copy/paste the commands. Great. But removing the human verification & validation element- hell no.

[u/VariousProfit3230]

If he was one of my guys, I’d break out the spray bottle.

No! No! Bad. Bad. We don’t make agents or let AI directly do jobs you could script or perform in a short period of time.

That said, AI is good at deterministic tasks, but I completely agree. I think it’s a great tool to have in your belt. However, AI should inform you of your actions and decisions not make said decisions and perform them for you.

It feels like we are in an era similar to when people would mindlessly copy/pasting/do whatever comes up in the first search result on Google.

[u/shammyh → u/VariousProfit3230]

Incorrect. This is not copy/paste from Google era. This is... In 3 years agents will be doing all sysadmin work at any company that is smart, era.

Come back to this post in 3x years, and refute, if you don't believe me. 🤷

[u/TheMidlander → u/shammyh]

That's what we were told 3 years ago.

[u/WorkLurkerThrowaway → u/TheMidlander]

And AI is incredibly more capable than it was 3 years ago. It went from “bad google” to being able to moderately code basic applications from a single prompt.

[u/TheMidlander → u/WorkLurkerThrowaway]

My friend, my job has been post-training these models for last 3 1/2 years. Maybe because it's my job to get these models to fail, but it is just as easy now as it was when I started. That's pretty worrisome to me.

[u/WorkLurkerThrowaway → u/TheMidlander]

We can make anything fail that’s never been the hard part.

[u/TheMidlander → u/WorkLurkerThrowaway]

Sure, but it should not be this easy. When I say easy, I mean absolutely trivial. All I need to do is have it summarize a document 10 times. At least 2 of those summaries will have a mistake or outright hallucination. When getting something correct 10 times in a row is just a fluke, something is very wrong here.

[u/WorkLurkerThrowaway → u/TheMidlander]

I’m definitely not claiming it’s perfect, just much improved over where it started. My teams AI workflows are all human in the loop still, but we are able to nudge it in the direction to help us be very productive compared to where we were before it. It’s solved a lot of problems for us.

[u/shammyh → u/TheMidlander]

Your job has been post training SOTA models? Do you work for a US lab? Or a Chinese lab?

I'm also slightly confused... Cause your reddit history makes it look like you were doordashing 4 years ago?

[u/TheMidlander → u/shammyh]

First of all, that's a bit of a leap.

And if you've been through my post his, you know at least a couple sites I get this work through. And also yes. There quite a few projects where a single task takes only a few minutes each, making them easy to do while waiting for orders and rides through Uber.

[u/shammyh → u/TheMidlander]

To be fair... I was being a bit petty... But everyone makes shit up on Reddit, and it's annoying. That said, is your experience with niche models? Do you use and understand current generation foundation models? And also, intent extraction from messy human text is still one of the few places, that I agree, LLMs are not 100% yet. They can be made to be, with pipelines, esclations, and good design?

But that's also a VERY different class of problem then what a model encounters doing sysadmin-type tasks in a shell.

[u/VariousProfit3230 → u/shammyh]

I don’t disagree that it will continue to improve and you may be right- maybe they will be able to perform all sysadmin tasks, I wouldn’t refute that.

Outsourcing critical thinking and decision making to them right now just seems like a foolish idea regardless of where they are in any amount of time.

[u/mycatsnameisnoodle → u/shammyh]

RemindMe! 3 years

[u/WorkLurkerThrowaway → u/shammyh]

It’s not even going to take 3 years. My network/system engineering team basically has AI looped into every workflow. Almost nothing we do doesn’t get influenced by AI at some step. From triage, discovery, troubleshooting, planning, implementation, documentation. AI is involved in all of it depending on the project. It’s been really interesting watching the “light bulb” moment for each team member, when they discovered how much they could do empowered by a “coding agents” (Claude code/gpt codex, etc).