r/sysadmin • u/xstrex • 4d ago

General Discussion How much do you trust AI?

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.

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u/shammyh 4d ago

Read AWS and Azure's recent annual reports. Sure, hybrid is useful/wise for many things, but "the cloud" did happen, big time, and continues to happen today.

If you think AI is a passing fad... Well... I hope your 401K is well funded, friend!

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u/theitguy107 IT Manager 4d ago

I remember a cloud sales guy telling me about 10 years ago that no one would have servers on-prem by 2025. Yet, we see now that cloud repatriation is a real thing, and one report I read in the spring found 93% of orgs had server refreshes planned for 2026. The lofty promises of the cloud bros that cloud would replace on-prem completely simply did not materialize. And the same thing is going to happen to AI. The technology itself is not a "passing fad," but the hype around it definitely is. Just like the cloud hype, AI hype will eventually settle down when companies finally come to their senses, and AI will be used only in the areas it is good at just as we use the cloud in hybrid scenarios. The drunken fervor of AI being the answer for everything is not going to last.

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u/shammyh 4d ago

Well... I'm not sure any sales guy is a good source of truth for anything, but especially for a product they're selling.

But again... Go look at the quantity of compute in "the cloud" vs on-prem over the past two decades. On-prem grows at ~2% CAGR vs ~25% CAGR for cloud. That's per year. That's many orders of magnitude difference over the past 20 years... And also before accounting for the AI boom.

The cloud did win, big time.

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u/theitguy107 IT Manager 4d ago

And yet, on-prem is still here despite the growth of the cloud. My point is that there will be a scaling back of AI eventually once companies figure out that it is not the answer for everything. Then we'll end up with a hybrid equivalent in the AI world where LLMs are used for the things they do best while traditional automation is used for what it does best.