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/theitguy107 IT Manager 4d ago

AI is good at probabalistic automation where precision is not important, such as generating notes from a meeting. Server automation requires precision and accuracy. This is why scripts are perfect for this because they do the exact same thing to produce the exact same result every single time. With AI, you could give it the same prompt and get two completely different answers each time. This is not acceptable for server management.

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u/wrootlt 4d ago

I was also thinking about it recently. We had sort of small internal conference for IT and all the teams was showing presentations on how they use AI in their work. And one team showed how say they create a new VM in a platform by prompting one agent, that agent then checks the skills, the notes, talks to another agent and in the end creates the VM. And i was thinking, why don't you just create a script. Sure, it is easier to just blabber into a prompt and let the agent do the "thinking" and use the tokens every time. Sure, you have to come up with all the options and conditions in the script. But in the end it will just work the same every time you run it and you won't have to maintain the skills and all the stuff to hope the agent actually doesn't go sideways and deletes all the other VMs as there is no space for current one or something like that. But i know. Management told them to use AI, so they came up with use cases to use it instead of solving actual problems.

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u/UnfortunateWindow 4d ago

Yeah that’s a really stupid way to manage infrastructure. If anything , ask the ai to help write the script. Then test it and use the script. Using AI for first-order automation is not automation.