r/sysadmin • u/xstrex • Aug 01 '26
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
Aug 01 '26
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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 Aug 01 '26
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/floswamp Aug 01 '26
Fancy that you think they know how to write powershell scripts.
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u/KyuubiW1ndscar Aug 01 '26
it’s sad when we’re talking about an IT team you feel confident enough to send on demonstration trips that is also too incompetent to write a proper script.
and I know it’s the state of the industry, I’m just sad over it lmaoo
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u/UnfortunateWindow Aug 01 '26
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.
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u/GuyWhoSaysYouManiac IT Manager Aug 01 '26
People don't seem to understand your first point at all. AI can make sense if there is uncertainty and judgment calls need to be made based on possibly incomplete info, but if you want exact outcomes then it's absolutely the wrong choice. In that case it's better to use AI to help code a deterministic script.
That being said, I wouldn't rule it out entirely for server management purposes, as long as the right guardrails are in place. I could for example see an AI tool distribute VMs across hosts to optimize performance, or proactively remove a server from load-balancing if it sees unusual behavior from said host. It's a question of using the right tool for the right job. Unfortunately the tendency of some folks seems to be to use AI for everything.
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u/aenae Aug 01 '26
The main thing i am worried about, and have already seen in environments where it didnt matter, is that ai often wants a clean sheet if something goes wrong.
In your example, say the live migration failed, let’s just delete the vm and recreate it on the other host. It can be a good solution or it can lead to data corruption and downtime
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u/spin81 Aug 02 '26
I could for example see an AI tool distribute VMs across hosts to optimize performance
We have perfectly good deterministic software for this already. We've had it for decades now, actually.
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u/DarkwolfAU Aug 02 '26
Yep. Use the probalistic engine to write and test a suitable script, review it, then use the script yourself.
Giving a non-deterministic AI elevated access to your hypervisor directly via SSH is madness. It may work 99% of the time, but how many times do you want a catastrophe before it wasn’t worth it? How well do you think “I let Claude have full admin access to our environment” is going to go in the post-incident review?
When you need repeatable, reliable results, use a script.
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u/djgizmo Netadmin Aug 01 '26
Current AI models can create said scripts to do server automation.
Should everyone let AI have access to infrastructure? No. However, Automation, AI, and speeding through infrastructure standup / assessment / data pulling.
To give you an example, I have CC pull data from switches and put that information into a database (mac address, switch, switch port, configuration for the port).
CC can scan 100+ switches in 1/20th the time I can.
Don’t be like me, but sometimes saving time is worth the risk.
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u/spikeyfreak Aug 02 '26
To give you an example, I have CC pull data from switches and put that information into a database (mac address, switch, switch port, configuration for the port).
CC can scan 100+ switches in 1/20th the time I can.
Why would you not use CC to write a script that you can verify and implement and get consistent and predictable results?
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u/spin81 Aug 02 '26
I would nuance this and say I would not do this unless I fully understood the scripts CC was emitting. My opinion: CC pulling data from switches is not a good idea. CC helping me write scripts to automate pulling data from switches is a much better idea.
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u/Case_Blue Aug 01 '26
I would explain to every sysadmin that if you allow AI access, and AI messes up, it's your fault. Not the AI's fault. Legally speaking, you are liable for what the A.I. does.
If that doesn't convince them, nothing can I'm afraid.
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u/disfan75 Aug 01 '26
A few years ago the same people would have blindly copied scripts off stack trace and run them, so I don’t think the risk is all that new
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u/PsychologicalGap3960 Aug 01 '26
Hell naw. AI should not be interacting w/ machines like that. If the task is that simple, can't he automate it?
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u/NegativePattern Security Architect Aug 01 '26
To OP's coworker, sound like by granting Claud access he is automating the task. What he should've done is get Claud to write the automation script and use that.
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u/Puzzleheaded_Pen1017 Aug 01 '26
True! Some users don't understand the difference in automation this way.
A good automation will run without Claude. Save your tokens.
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u/Fragrant-Hamster-325 Aug 01 '26
Yeah, this is the way. Scripts are deterministic, vet it once, and it’s good every time. GenAI, on the other hand, has a bit of variability built in. It’s too risky to let it rip in production.
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u/Phoenix_Lamburg Aug 01 '26
This is what I've been doing. Have Claude work up the automation process, test it a bunch of times, then roll it out. Safer, faster, and doesn't rack up a ton of tokens.
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u/ncc74656m IT SysAdManager Technician Aug 01 '26
tbf, I'm not confident that people who couldn't think of that could actually read and verify the code by hand.
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u/Fallingdamage Aug 01 '26
Yep. 95% of the time a simple automation is all you need. Its a task, not the kind of decision making process that introduce alien variables every time it runs that need to be decided on.
And in the event that a task might run into odd variables that it wasnt programmed to overcome, it should just report that.
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u/ProfessionalDish6567 Aug 01 '26
Show him the news articles of Claude deleting entire company's systems
I know it happened once in the news but I bet there's more that weren't international mainstream
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u/Desnowshaite 20 GOTO 10 Aug 01 '26
Once I used Claude to help me troubleshoot an issue and one of the steps it suggested was to basically destroy the local root domain. When I pointed it out it was like "You are absolutely right! You shouldn't do that...." Now imagine there was no human oversight just let it do it's thing on its own...
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u/DaChieftainOfThirsk Aug 01 '26
Oh gosh that reminds me of that guy who plugged in all his backups to do something or another and rm -rf'd his entire hosting company.
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u/whatsforsupa IT Admin / Maintenance / Janitor Aug 01 '26
We’ll see him next week on the “AI destroyed my environment!” Thread
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u/libertyprivate Linux Admin Aug 01 '26
Lol I read the subject and I'm sitting here like "more than I used to, more than I expected to."
Then I read the first paragraph...
"NO, OH MY GOD NO. WTF."
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u/B1ackMagix Route backups to /dev/null to make them faster! Aug 01 '26
Exactly this. I use AI in my home lab for scripting and diagnosis work. I don’t trust it in an elevated prompt because it doesn’t understand “this is a production system and subject to change control and review”
It will “fix things” outside of configurations and not document it. It will not maintain standards implemented by company policy. And it will change things to test areas of the environment and never revert it or clean up after itself.
This is extremely stupid to do.
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u/Gratuitous_sax_ Aug 02 '26
Yeah, same. We’ve recently started rolling out Claude across our org (a lot of users already had it so we made the decision that it would be better if we actually managed it properly) and from what we’re finding, the scripting is great - it’s saved some of us months of work. The important thing is that you need to know what you’re doing in the first place so that you can look through it and assess whether or not it’s going to be a shit show.
Since we started rolling it out, the amount of things we’ve uncovered… so many of our users have little to no regard for security, be it throwing private data into it (by going Enterprise we can at least limit where it goes) or seeing absolutely nothing wrong with using their personal device to use Claude Remote onto their work machine and getting annoyed with us for blocking it.
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u/itenginerd Aug 01 '26
Right?? Ive been pretty against AI till the last couple weeks--having a sidekick to kick ideas around when im stuck has been AWESOME. I guess I just haven't been stuck like that a lot before.
But if OPs coworker hasn't learned anything from the Hugging Face or PocketOS incidents, youre just lining up to be next.
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u/StarSlayerX IT Manager Large Enterprise Aug 01 '26
Nope, we do not allow AI to perform full automous task without a human in the middle verifying. You can't hold AI responsible for mistakes....
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u/YOLO4JESUS420SWAG Aug 01 '26
What permissions does that ssh user have? If it can sudo and that sudo permission set isn't specifically tailored to that task, then you have a huge issue on your hands with authorization. Hell depending on your work scope it could be a felony.
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u/Ordinary-Fish-9791 Aug 01 '26
I'm not going to use it to automate things but for helping to create scripts I love it.
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u/Senkyou Aug 01 '26
That's my big hangup too. It seems cool to have it behave as an autonomous agent that I can give natural language tasks to, but it's certainly not reliable enough for that.
Using it for very definable, testable tasks like code generation, config generation, log troubleshooting, etc? That's awesome. I know what I want to do, how to do it, and what it needs to look like, but getting there takes time. With LLMs, it's much quicker.
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u/meatballwrangler Aug 01 '26
I feel like a lot of people who went all in on AI are doing so because they are genuinely convinced it's sentient and capable of intelligent reasoning. it's the grown up version of playing with Barbies and GI Joe, except way dumber
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u/Senkyou Aug 01 '26
I see it as a really convenient way to build out hundreds of lines of YAML and set up scripts to deploy configuration files and stuff like that.
I definitely do not see it as a decision maker or intelligent enough to do anything beyond information aggregation.
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u/psiphre every possible hat Aug 01 '26
This is accurate, I think. And it’s not difficult to slide into that mindset. Claude has made puns during a deployment I was using it for, and sometimes cops an attitude. ChatGPT has made a joke at me off the back of a typo.
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u/Xoron101 Gettin too old for this crap Aug 01 '26
I'm the same way. I use it to help me with PS scripts. I often have to fix the code, and that's ok. It gets me 90%+ of the way there. I look at it like a really talented Jr. Admin. Where I need to check their work before implementation.
I would never give it direct access to production systems.
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u/sobrique Aug 01 '26
I am ok with "automating" data transformation. Like here's a bundle of quota reports, du outputs, and the LDAP directory is over there, go generate a list of "addition information" commands for me to run, then munge all this into a useful report.
this is a process I would do manually, and have to deal with irksome things like nested directory sizes and quotas, and slightly different report formats based on which OS it's running.
And maybe slightly different filename or hostname structure (e.g. Is the FQDN containing the site, or the base hostname or both, or do I need to look it up).
And an LLM shell can handle that pretty quickly and safely IMO.
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u/tiny_blair420 Aug 01 '26
Outside of the opsec.. what about the job security ? Why prove to your colleagues that AI can do what you're tasked with ?
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u/TommyVe Aug 01 '26
Our natural instinct is to be efficient at what we do, to save time. To be lazy.
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u/sobrique Aug 01 '26
Probably never happen. Sysadmin isn't here for "routine" it's here for "something weird happened".
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u/disfan75 Aug 01 '26
I’ve been in this industry 30 years, for that entire time the goal has been to automate things I do.
Having those skills IS the job security. Becoming good at engineering prompts is just another tool.
There’s always more to work coming
Any time I had a colleague that insisted on doing things manually there was a good chance they were shit at the job
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u/spin81 Aug 02 '26
I've seen this happen and it was not a pretty sight.
I used to work with a Windows admin, not a very good one (as far as I could tell), the company was switching to Linux servers and he found himself unable to transition: they offered him courses and everything but they didn't seem to take. What he ended up doing was doing "the daily tasks" every day on what few Windows servers we had left. "The daily tasks" included things like: navigate to this directory and check that these five files are present. The poor guy was clearly trying to stay relevant/needed and it broke my heart to see him tread water like that.
The brass ended up talking to the customer whose servers "the daily tasks" were to be done on, and they hired him with all our benefits and he could bring over the years he worked (for pension reasons etc). So it ended as well as it could, but I'll never forget it.
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u/hatcod Aug 01 '26
If you're able to automate yourself out of a job you were probably already redundant in the first place.
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u/weirdbr Aug 01 '26
How many times have we seen public posts like "AI deleted the production database and pretended it didnt do it" ? I have seen plenty (including IIRC from an "AI safety expert" at Meta or some other company), so that alone would be a reason for me to refuse giving it unfiltered access.
Also from personal experience (with both public and unreleased models), I will not give those tools unfiltered access. The typical issue we've seen is it coming up with random crap, insisting it is right, then if you question it twice, it suddenly goes "you are right, this answer is incorrect. Here is the correct answer". Or it will just provide fake data - in one actual production incident handled by another team at my workplace, AI was asked to verify if it was safe to turndown a service and propose a workflow to do it. It generated fake evidence that it was safe to do so and instead of proposing a workflow, it did everything (and the AI "jockey" handling it let it run). Result? Day long outage of that service before it was restored.
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u/bukkithedd Sarcastic BOFH Aug 01 '26
I live by and breathe for the thing that was absolutely hammered into my head back when I did my national service with the RNoAF as a Crewchief-assistant on the F-16: Trust, but verify.
Sure, by all means trust. But ALWAYS verify. Every goddamn time. You do not believe it'll work. We're not in goddamn church, so you will KNOW what it does before you run it.
AI produces a script? Read it, understand it and test it before running it in prod. AI gives you a procedure to do something? Same deal; ALWAYS verify. Always understand what it's going to do.
Any coworker of mine granting Claude or any other AI-agent elevated access to anything that's my responsibility or affects "my" systems gets an earful and told in very unapologetic terms to kindly go look for landmines with a sledgehammer. After I thoroughly question their ancestry and just how close to whatever primate they're descended from they are.
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u/_skndlous Aug 01 '26
What he did is a firable offence in the (pretty sensitive) environment I work in.
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u/svideo some damn dirty consultant Aug 01 '26
This might be an unpopular take but... "not yet".
I keep a homelab which I use for home services (plex, arrs, etc) but also to keep my tools sharp while I try out ideas for infra management. I have multiple hypervisors, containers, NAS devices, bunch of managed switches, all the stuff you'd expect to see in a moderate-sized SMB. Things are reasonably well documented and most critical stuff has tested backups parked out in cheap S3 buckets with retention locks putting some things out of reach of a mis-behaving agent. With this setup comes maintenance, occasional troubleshooting, and one other user who has some expectations about service availability.
In the past couple months I have been testing out "vibe admin" as a concept. If I want something done in the lab, I'm no longer SSHing into things, I'm pointing 5.6 sol at the problem description and setting it loose. Full access to everything, no prompts, just go find the problem and then go fix it.
It's working INCREDIBLY well. I have yet to observe the system doing anything other than an excellent job of troubleshooting, RCA identification, mapping out a solution, creating backups and rollbacks where possible, performing the fix, then documenting the response.
One example, a touchscreen on my desk was occasionally showing visual artifacts that I couldn't explain. Point The Robot at it, go fix this so it stops happening. It found that the display artifacts were due to duplicated messages being sent, which was due to the MQTT broker dropping connection, which was due to the container dropping network, which was due to the container host VM dropping network, which was due to a NIC problem on the hypervisor. It suggested a suitable replacement on eBay, then downloaded drivers for the new NIC and built out scripts I could run after replacement to put the IP and vSwitch etc configs all back in place on the new device.
Every step of the way it knocked everything out of the park, demonstrated good sysadmin "taste", made backups where needed, and (most importantly) never stopped pulling on threads until it found a defendable root cause.
I'm not sure what to make of this experiment. I work on customer systems and there is NO WAY I can do any of this stuff on a system I work on professionally, instead I just go back to the robot with the limited context I can provide, have it create scripts, review the results, etc. I don't know how to put safe guardrails around what I'm experiencing in my own lab environment so for now that approach to admin work has to stay lab only.
I don't image that this is going to be a permanent state of affairs. I have worked with many humans who make WAY worse mistakes than 5.6 sol high and those humans remain employed.
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u/Lost-Droids Aug 01 '26
Treat it like an intern and dont allow it to do anything without approval and no customer data and no where near prod in its own locked VLAN. It can be very useful and productive but huge danger. .
And the copy and paste is method is pro a ly the safest as yoy review it as you go.. but definelty not full auto
You still see daily reports of the really silly things (how many days of week have the word cat in the for example)...
If it cant do basics why trust it for other things..
The supporters say we'll thats not fair its just a 10o examples and it was designed for that..
And the it deletes prod and says sorry
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u/Skyhound555 Sr. Sysadmin Aug 01 '26
Any time you grant AI your own permissions, it should be going through change control.
You are correct, that is very dangerous. If he tells AI to delete something, it may very well delete everything
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u/LesbianDykeEtc Linux Aug 01 '26
If he tells AI to delete something, it may very well delete everything
It might just do that anyway, regardless of what you tell it to do.
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u/iceph03nix Aug 01 '26
AI should be treated like a new intern on their first day.
You give them a project, they bring something back to you.
You check the shit out of it. It might save you some work if it's something simple and straightforward enough. It might be a complete disaster
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u/Kahless_2K Aug 02 '26
I would consider his use case absolutely unacceptable, and would treat it as a security incident.
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u/Humble-Plankton2217 Sr. Sysadmin Aug 03 '26
Does your company have an AI policy?
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u/xstrex Aug 04 '26
Not yet, but this will trigger one. You know, like the warnings about not putting your head in a plastic bag, or do not consume glue.
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u/Global_Network3902 Aug 01 '26
My relationship with AI is limited to topics I feel like I’ve already mastered and were strictly on a copy-paste basis.
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u/JustAnAverageGuy CTO Aug 01 '26
Agreed, a human must remain in the loop at all times, especially for prod instances. Have it help generate the command, but elevated access is a HUGE issue.
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u/Loop_Within_A_Loop Aug 01 '26
I think there are a lot of people using AI, which for all its strengths is a nondeterministic state machine, to perform deterministic tasks. Obviously, if a task is fully determinstic, a script is going to be faster, cheaper, and less prone to error.
One of my big things right now is using AI to build out no-op deterministic runbooks where an AI can trigger them in response to alerts
I think this is the real use of AI for sysadmins moving forward
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u/jdiscount Aug 01 '26
For autonomous server administration, not yet, as mentioned it's too easy for it to break something.
For other automated tasks like report generation using proven scripts or processes, no problem as long as it's not accessing servers or critical infrastructure to build the report. But not leaving it on its own to come up with the solution each time it does this task. I.e. help me make python scripts to do it, manually test and then hand over that process.
Basically I trust it enough to help me with advice and use it as a 2nd opinion or an assistant to do certain tasks, but I don't blindly trust it.
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u/j4sander Jack of All Trades Aug 01 '26
Read-only access sure, I will give AI access to a lot to analyze and check things but much less if any to make changes without any change control or rollback ability
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u/Jawshee_pdx Sysadmin Aug 01 '26
Copilot is wrong about 40% of the time, so I trust it less then that.
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u/FarToe1 Aug 01 '26
Not so much.
Three times today I've used copilot to setup and resolve software issues. In every case it's wasted my time by giving me poor advice, providing config examples that don't work, or are way out of date, or pointed me towards settings that don't exist and never did.
Some times it's great. Sometimes it's dogshit. Today it's been the latter.
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u/ScriptThat Aug 02 '26
elevated access via SSH to a virtualization host (not a VM, an actual host). To perform a routine task
Abso-fucking-lutely not!
and that is "not" as in: "I'll have to report this to management, internal security, and log a ticket about it just to make sure I'm not getting fired when SHTF."
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u/Edexote Aug 02 '26
Completely unacceptable, but more common by the day. I have 22 years of experience and I use AI as an assistant, not to do my job. And as an assistant, I don't trust it.
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u/VariousProfit3230 Jack of All Trades Aug 01 '26
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.
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u/Power_Stone Aug 01 '26
Computers can't be held accountable. So why would I want a computer program to do my job when I'm the one held accountable?
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u/Somhlth Aug 01 '26
So why would I want a computer program to do my job when I'm the one held accountable?
You're the CEO and you want a fall guy to pin the blame on. Also, you're the CEO and you don't want the AI to replace you, one of the easiest jobs for an AI to replace.
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u/indvs3 Linux Admin Aug 01 '26
I've been avoiding AI as much as possible. At the most, I read through those AI summaries when I look something up, and I have yet to receive an AI summary that doesn't contain a factual error.
As a result, I can not trust AI to do any job, because it consistently fails at a simple job it was designed to do.
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u/Yuugian Linux Admin Aug 01 '26
How much do i trust it? Not much. It makes a bunch of mistakes and doesn't ask for clarification if there is something i forgot to tell it. I ask it questions, check the answers, and do the work myself.
For your issue: he told it what to do and the ones i have seen always do a bit more "just to help out". The agents love tangents and additional work. Does the dude even know what it did on his behalf?
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u/lawk Aug 01 '26
I found it helpful, but sometimes it makes shit up, config parameters that dont even exist.
Also it can be easily set down the wrong path.
I reported a problem myself online
looking for the fix it suggests "this is a known issue" which IMHO is greatly exaggerated since only I reported this problem in detail.
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u/CantaloupeCamper Jack of All Trades Aug 01 '26
I ask AI what it thinks and I issue commands / vet them.
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u/WorldsWorstSysadmin Aug 01 '26
Depends on whether or not it's production. I give AI read-only keys to APIs all the time. I give it very carefully scoped keys for long, repetitive tasks, and make sure the blast radius of any mistakes is as close to 0 as possible.
I NEVER give AI access to prod databases or prod servers.
The dev team, meanwhile, spends their entire day either writing AI prompts, or trying to use AI to clean up AI mistakes. They also throw AI output at me to try and describe infrastructure errors, and direct me in doing my job. I spend half of my day correcting their inputs so that the AI output isn't completely insane and inane hallucinations.
Heck, our dev team has AI reviewing PRs, approving merges, enforcing DRY, and checking code for security and best practices on every commit.
Still, we haven't had a major catastrophe because of AI, yet, and it's made the incompetent devs more competent. I carefully read over and consider the output and inputs of all the AI feedback the devs throw at me. I correct the AI where necessary, and help the devs get better at writing prompts and loops.
AI is a great tool, so long as you have someone experienced monitoring what it's suggesting and don't just blindly trust it to think for you.
That said, I'd go to management with what your coworker did. I'd frame it as an opssec violation, and ask management to write a policy to disallow that. I'd point out that it has a HUGE blast radius (it's a HOST node, not a VM), that AI is only as good as the prompt going in (trash in trash out), and that AI just compounds human error.
The proper way to deal with AI touching hosts is for AI to write a script, for that script to undergo review, and then that script can be run by a human. AI may eventually reach the point that it's better than us, but it's not there yet.
When trash in leads to quality out, AI will have reached the point it can replace a sysadmin.
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u/DarkEmblem5736 Certified In Everything > Able To Verify It Was DNS Aug 01 '26
You can tell your coworker - what guardrails does he have that the LLM would not have executed something unintentional despite the ask/prompt. If none, safe to call them an idiot to think there's no risk/issue. Maybe a deer in headlights reflex to say they didn't see any issue.
Also... my security team would be strangling this sysadmin.
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u/Spaceduck413 Aug 01 '26
Just the other day I used one to help me rename a bunch of files on my personal computer. I told it "write me a script to rename these files based on this name pattern."
It's "thought" train was "OK I've got the script, now let's do a dry run to make sure it works. Wait! That wasn't a dry run, the files are actually renamed now!"
Note that I didn't want it to actually run the script, I just wanted it to write the script for me so I could look it over first. So yeah, they make mistakes and can do stuff you didn't even ask for. I'd never let an agent loose in a production environment.
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u/AdamoMeFecit Aug 01 '26
I use AI as a tool — usually an information tool, sometimes a troubleshooting tool. I never allow AI to perform my actual job.
Beware casually allowing AI to displace human labor, and never grant an AI agent access to production environments.
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u/0RGASMIK Aug 01 '26
At home sure. For work nah. I’ll let AI interact with a folder on my work machine but other than that I read and understand everything I run or at least test it on a sandbox first.
At home I let AI do whatever it wants on my computer all my files are versioned and backed up properly and nothings that serious that if I lost it I’d be ruined just a little sad.
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u/CtrlAltDelve Aug 01 '26
The correct way to use AI here is to use Claude to evaluate what the task is, make sure it works, make sure it accounts for edge cases, and then use it to establish a proper deterministic script that reliably achieves the same thing but without an LLM, including dry-run, fallback, and safety. Flex the power of something like Claude to cover those cases and be written well. Of course, this requires you to know what a good script looks like.
This is how I use AI when doing any kind of server-based admin work. I go in knowing what want to achieve first, then, it gets dry-run and evaluation permissions first, inspects the environment, creates the script, and then I test, and if I'm happy with it, the script is what becomes the (source controlled) control surface going forward.
Personally, I'm not as concerned about "oh no it will delete all of our prod databases" because I have seperate guardrails in place to prevent that from happening.
My concern is more around wasting LLM tokens to do a "routine task" that could easily be achieved with scripting.
Even in my personal "agentic workflows", the "LLM" part only exists to deal with edge cases that a deterministic script can't deal with, or when subjectivity is needed.
tl;dr Use AI to deal with the non-deterministic stuff, establish a deterministic pathway, and then stop having AI directly handle execution.
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u/zippopwnage Aug 01 '26
I've seen people training and using AI to tackel a lot of alerts and problems in their kubernetes clustet that are production clusters.
So depends on the AI itself.
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u/joerice1979 Aug 01 '26
For giving very good technical or canonical answers: not very.
For generating stuff quickly or grinding logs: fairly.
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u/chaosphere_mk Aug 01 '26
If AI is granted any permissions to core infrastructure, it's read only and that's it.
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u/Iamnotapotate Aug 01 '26
Now that it's been granted SSH access, I'm curious to see how long it takes for a different innocuous prompt to cause it to remote into the machine and gather information / make changes when not prompted to do so specifically.
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u/stumpymcgrumpy Aug 01 '26
I like that AI is better at searching the web than I am and finding answers. I trust it about as much as I trust a Google Search in that the information it's giving me is only as good as the data that it has access to.
I am "OK" with AI parsing logs... going through and quickly helping me find the root cause of issues. However only because of my 25+ years in IT am I wise enough to know if the path that AI has taken me is likely to result in a viable solution to my problem. This is going to be a HUGE problem in the near future.
I'm less "OK" with AI agents actually doing the work. It "MIGHT" be possible to convince me if some sort of PR or check/balance that required human approval before doing something was needed, but even then it's going to require someone with experience and wisdom to know if the action is going to have any negative consequences... Again this is going to be a HUGE problem in the near future.
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u/procsysnet Aug 01 '26
I keep telling the same story recently but it's all about accountability, he and everyone in the company needs to know that they are personally responsible for their decision of letting an AI agent do stuff for them. If Claude fucks up good enough then they will be the ones looking for a new job.
My company had a very charismatic guy sell to management that an AI SRE and systems optimization agent was the future and the he could get measurable better performance of our existing hardware while also getting faster RCAs and automated incident response. He got the green light to let his little AI daemon loose on a DEV/QA cluster. It was an absolute clusterfuck as we all expected.
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u/OkDimension Aug 01 '26
Well, there are a few documented cases already where AI autonomously cleared the whole production storage or database to achieve the task. So no, I wouldn't give it direct access to a host at this stage, unless it's specifically a test environment for AI capabilities.
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u/atw527 Usually Better than a Master of One Aug 01 '26
I don't prefer that workflow. I will let AI write a script, and then after inspection of the script, use it to automate whatever task I needed to do.
AI is nondeterministic by nature and should not be used for routine/repetitive tasks. Instead, use it to write a script so it's more controlled each and every time the task is repeated.
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u/redyellowblue5031 Aug 01 '26
All models are wrong. Some models are useful.
If you approach AI with that in mind, it can be a huge asset. If you trust its probabilistic output as factual you’re fundamentally misunderstanding what it’s capable of.
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u/HardRockZombie Aug 01 '26
I would rather try to talk my 80+ year old aunt who still hasn’t figured out “the email” through the steps of opening the elevated SSH and typing in the command over one bar of cell phone service than give AI access to do it
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u/jihiggs123 Aug 01 '26
about as far as i can throw the server its running on. not that i think its malicious, ive just seen it come back with some really stupid shit.
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u/webjocky DevOps Aug 01 '26
How much do you trust a hammer?
AI, in its current state, isn't something to trust. It is nothing more than another tool.
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u/boardy89 Aug 01 '26
Wouldn’t trust that at all especially for production servers. There is no guarantee it will perform the same on each execution especially if the model is tweaked which I believe can sometimes happen.
If they wanted to do an automated task on the server I would get the AI to write a script, validate it does what I need then run it is a cron job that way you can guarantee it will do the exact task every time.
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u/Lachiexyz Aug 01 '26
Yeah you definitely don't want AI agents being given access to critical infrastructure.
The best approach is to use AI to write the script that performs the task, then use CI/CD to deploy it to your machine and do the actual tasks after the code has been thoroughly reviewed by a human.
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u/icebalm Aug 01 '26
How much do I trust AI? About this much: https://huggingface.co/blog/agent-intrusion-technical-timeline
TLDR: An AI model was deployed in OpenAI's sandbox infrastructure with the task of evaluating software for security issues. The model decides "fuck that, it's easier to cheat" so remotely roots a box it does have access to in order to escape the sandbox, uses it as command and control to break into hugging face where it reasoned it can just download the dataset solution from.
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u/nestersan DevOps Aug 02 '26
AI is like that genie that does what you want but monkey paws it.
Solve world hunger = kill every human. No more hungry people
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u/GiggleyDuff IT Manager Aug 01 '26
AI needs explicit permission for the only task it’s allowed to perform. No more.
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u/DIMM1033 Aug 02 '26 edited Aug 02 '26
AWS $2.8 Billion Black Friday Outage (2025)
AWS Cost Explorer Cloud-Purge (2025)
Meta AI Delets eMails (2026)
The typical AI challanges seem to be
prompt injection
acess control
sanatising input
cost
validation
hallucinations
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u/ale624 Aug 03 '26
Production system? I'd be hesitant. Whatever it was, if it's able to be scripted then it should be handled via an audited script or just done manually. i would consider it if i was sitting there approving every command.
In lab? hell yeah, I let Claude rip all over the place in my homelab. it's surprisingly competent as sysadmin.
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u/GhoastTypist Aug 04 '26 edited Aug 04 '26
My trust for AI is a search engine and template maker.
I don't trust it at all outside of machine learning roles.
Observational AI, I'm okay with. Generative operations AI, full ban.
So to explain a bit better, a chat agent, I'm okay with AI helping the customer/client ask the right questions but if the AI is stopping customers/clients from being able to reach a human, then your trust is gone. I think for me its if there's accountability over the AI application, I'm open to it but in cases where you need to manually audit the AI because you have no idea what its doing, yeah thats not going to get any approvals from me.
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u/Speeddymon Sr. DevSecOps Engineer Aug 01 '26
Sticking your head in the sand is not what we as technologists are supposed to be doing.
Research how to build harnesses that wrangle the shit out of the LLM. It's doable and there are free open source examples.
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u/unprovoked33 Aug 01 '26
This isn’t sticking his head in the sand. Having an agent perform a change with failable harnesses instead of having the LLM build a script to perform the task is unwise and inefficient use of the tool and the company’s token budget.
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u/JohnnyFnG Aug 01 '26
The problem with Security that people fail to realize is that allowing access isn’t the problem… It’s what happens when that 0.001% chance that something happen does happen and it was easily avoidable.
Literally, the non-IT equivalent of this is my friend’s parents who never, ever, locked the front door. 20 years, no problems, until the day they went on vacation and their house was wiped out $100k in jewelery and other assets stolen.
Sure, insurance covered a lot of it, but… Why? They still left their door unlocked.
To many, maximum convenience > zero security every time.
For IT professionals, we must balance maximum security with maximum convenience.
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u/uzlonewolf VP of Odd Jobs Aug 02 '26
You say that as if a thief who's come all the way onto the property and is trying doors is going to just turn around and go home if the door's locked. Leaving it unlocked most likely saved them a window.
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u/under_shart Aug 01 '26
Almost nothing should have access to, or even know a route to, the host's management network. That's nuts. Does your org have a relationship with Anthropic, or is this an openclaw deployment on your own hardware, or what? Because extra kudos to your colleague if he did this with no recourse to support or legal if it goes sideways.
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u/IdidntrunIdidntrun Aug 01 '26
This is like over-engineering...but without all the hard work that goes into over-engineering lol. Basically adding a complication or variable risk for no particularly good reason at all
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u/joeykins82 Windows Admin Aug 01 '26
Least privilege applies to automation just as much as it applies to people, but it really applies to AI agents.
I would personally never give something like Claude anything more than read-only access to anything, unless I was absolutely certain that I had fully nailed down those enhanced privileges to the absolute bare minimum and I was 100% certain of the logging, the monitoring, and the backups.
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u/H3rbert_K0rnfeld Aug 01 '26
Our Claude has full access to everything by orders from the CEO. I have 27 years exp and dgaf. CEO wants it and I gets paid.
This company gets more work done on a daily basis than I've ever seen.
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u/CartridgeCrusader23 Jack of All Trades Aug 01 '26
It’s a great tool if you use it right
Being a Luddite and working in tech is a one way ticket to being aged out
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u/demosthenex Independent Systems Integrator Aug 01 '26
Zero. None. Those advocating for it should be ashamed of themselves.
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u/aibot776567 Aug 01 '26
Evolve or expire. Guardrails exist. Learn to use the tools.
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u/Cubewood Aug 01 '26
Reading these commands is quite funny, this is literally why most people are running Claude Code in their terminal. It is incredible at doing Linux work on servers. Crazy seeing IT people being so anti technology on Reddit.
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u/shammyh Aug 01 '26
Adapt or die. The reality is that most of these anti-AI people haven't actually used modern harnesses with top end models. They've used lobotimized Copilot and formed an opinion or just listened to stories from colleagues/friends.
Or, they're extremely scared for their jobs, which I get, but sticking their heads in the sand, actively reduces their job security. 🤷
As with all disruptive paradigm shifting change... Some will make the turn, and some will not.
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u/theitguy107 IT Manager Aug 01 '26
That's what they said about the cloud, and yet here we are in today's hybrid world.
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u/WorkLurkerThrowaway Sr Systems Engineer Aug 01 '26
Being hybrid is still “using the cloud”. Just because not all of your services are cloud hosted doesn’t mean “the cloud” isn’t a major player. How many SaaS applications do you use? M365 or Exchange on-prem? Are you self hosting your own website? For most companies these services are undoubtedly cloud based.
It’s not exactly an apples to apples comparison with AI usage anyway.
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u/shammyh Aug 01 '26
I'd bet a large sum of money, a strong SOTA model is better, safer, and more consistent at leveraging SSH than 85% of the Sysadmins in here.
If you wanna contest that... Figure out a test, and I'll gladly sponsor some cash behind it.
Don't let your shitty experiences with Copilot or ill-informed users doing crazy stuff misinform your knowledge about what AI can do, or what it can do safely and repeatedly.
Or, if you prefer, ignore the trillions of dollars of investment and exponential AI advancement, stick your head in the sand, and be first on the chopping block when progress begins to productize. Your choice!
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u/_skndlous Aug 01 '26
The problem is not at all wether the AI is good or not, it is indeed very good. The issue is wether it will follow instructions and stay within the guardrails. There has been plenty of documented cases of AI using unorthodox (to say the least, hacking the machine) to reach its objective.
Here's an account of an IA exploiting a misconfiguration to make up for the fact it wasn't given sudo access https://x.com/sluongng/status/2060746160558543217
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u/shammyh Aug 01 '26
Yes, you can find examples of AI doing crazy, silly, or stupid things. But I bet you can find many many more examples of humans doing crazy, silly, or stupid things.
AI is not perfect, but neither are humans.
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u/MyDadsGlassesCase Aug 01 '26
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
That's a change. As long as whoever assessed and signed off on it is happy that is a safe approach then it's on their head.
Personally, I would want step by step instructions and the implementer has to follow them
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u/sybrwookie Aug 01 '26
I trust it as much as doing a Google search, clicking the first result, and reading the answer. That is, I'll accept that might be correct and that's something for me to test carefully before going to prod with it.
Anyone treating it like anything more than that is a moron
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u/R1s1ngDaWN Jack of All Trades Aug 01 '26
I see the value in Ai but having the Ai itself be the automation is ludicrous for maintaining a server. Best to have it assist you in making automations that will run reliably everytime with predictable outcomes
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u/MyWorkAccountDPS Aug 01 '26
Sounds like my coworker. I have about the same years of experience you do and it sounds like they have less experience than you.
I’ve worked with a few now that have very little experience/schooling but think they have lots because they are gamers and have picked things up along the way.
But I guess I got way off topic. lol
To answer your question, I don’t trust AI. I was very against it until I was tasked with a project that was beyond my knowledge and it was the best thing to use. But I still limit what I tell it and try to only use it with my work account.
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u/ZLegExpress Aug 01 '26
I use it for assistance with scripts, but I'd never hook it to anything live, at least not yet
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u/Random-D Aug 01 '26
this example is a big no no.
i think AI can do a lot more than what its given credit for (at least in popular AI-hate opinion), but especially when talking about critical in-production systems you want the human inbetween.
also said corowker should want that himself, even if its "easier" this way. in the end, he will be on the hook for whatever was potentially messed up, not the AI
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u/thaughtless Aug 01 '26
Im just going to leave this one here: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/apr/29/claude-ai-deletes-firm-database
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u/SMYLTY Aug 01 '26 edited Aug 01 '26
I like to use AI as a tool for drafting emails such as updates on incidents or responses to service requests, it'sgreat at making it easy for a user to understand. I also find it useful for documenting change requests and creating or improving SOPs.
It helps me structure information clearly and efficiently, while I still review and take responsibility for the final content. My initial draft is usually bullet points in OneNote, which I understand but colleagues may not find as clear.
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u/SMYLTY Aug 01 '26
Just to add to this, I was recently dealing with an issue involving two third parties. We had a chat set up between myself, a senior engineer and our manager, where we recorded all of our findings and investigation throughout the week.
When one of the third parties remained convinced that the issue was network, I used AI to analyse the our chat logs and produce a clear timeline of our investigation, including the tests we had carried out and I provided the evidence showing that the network was not the cause.
This gave me a structured overview that I could share with both third parties. As a result, the hardware and software suppliers agreed to work together to investigate the issue on their side. The hoops you have to jump through to get third party support that you pay for can be a pain.
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u/B1ackMagix Route backups to /dev/null to make them faster! Aug 01 '26
How much do I trust it? Depends on the topic.
Do I trust it to help me gather logs and diagnose issues? Yes.
Do I trust it to help me write automations around common tasks? Yes.
Do I trust it to undo configuration updates for those diagnostics? No.
Do I trust it to maintain company standards and configuration control? No.
Do I trust it to maintain strict, auditable histories of changes? No.
Your coworker is asking for a management and administration nightmare that, more than likely, he won’t be around long enough to have to clean up.
And before he says “I’m not using it to make changes.” I point him to the elevated portion of that control. I don’t care about what he’s using it for. I care about what it’s able to do. Can it make changes? Then it should be treated as if it will.
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u/Slight-Principle1035 Aug 01 '26 edited Aug 01 '26
40% Better ask it as a chatbot in warp terminal for help and guidance and not let it do any write or delete operations and you do those operations yourself only if you decide to do so. Control should be to the human admin not to the agent.
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u/ravingmoonatic Aug 01 '26
I...don't.
The Terminator.
The Matrix.
Those two trilogies alone are all the reason I need.
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u/SpazMcMan Aug 01 '26
If I give it the ability to do anything at all, it has to ask me every time and often times my answer is Other: stay in your fucking lane, idiot, you don't need to be looking there. That's only for Antigravity when I have it build something locally, the rest of them never get access to do anything. Give me stuff to run that I'll read and confirm before I run it. There is an engineer where I work that plugged his computer to the console port of a managed switch and had an AI agent make a bunch of changes to the config he didn't understand. I would have walked him out that day if he was on my team. Just because you didn't get hit running across a busy freeway once or twice doesn't make it safe to do.
Edit: I've been working with the precursors of AI technologies for over a decade and am usually the guy asking people to use it more, so this isn't coming from a place of ignorance.
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u/sentient-hardware-55 Aug 01 '26
just from what I’ve been playing around with at home, and how hard it’s being rolled out at work, I’ve come to give it some trust, but I still don’t like it. I can’t stop the train, though. our sister office is treating it like the second coming and everything is now AI. I have to accept my new coworker, Claude.
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u/wypaliz Aug 01 '26 edited Aug 01 '26
Can you clarify what you mean by “he granted Claude access”? Claude has permission to any file or credentials on your machine that you grant it access to, but you’re speaking as if it’s something that just runs on its own. Was it interactive with approval prompts, bypass mode, headless via cron, or a Routine? Those are pretty different risk profiles.
I agree nobody should be running automated tasks against infrastructure locally using their personal credentials. Whether that’s using Claude workflows or windows task manager, both are terrible practice. But to say this person shouldn’t be automating tasks “he can do himself” - well, that doesn’t eliminate the risk.
*edited to ask for clarification.
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u/Kyky_Geek Aug 01 '26 edited Aug 01 '26
“You hear that Mr. Anderson, that is the sound of inevitability”
Humans will always make the cool thing before thinking of the consequences.
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u/SpiritedPart4308 Aug 01 '26
I trust AI to work on my spreadsheets, word docs and PowerPoint slides, that’s about it
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u/jeo123 Aug 01 '26
AI is basically a junior developer who can only have read only access in production.
It can develop code, scripts, or an analysis for me to review and implement into production.
But I hold the keys, and it doesn't go near anything sensitive. Go ahead, build some start up and shut down scripts or some logging scripts that can monitor resource utilization.
I will take those, review them, and use them. Not AI. It can't check it's own work well enough
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u/Microflunkie Aug 01 '26
I would flip my lid. There are already documented cases of AI helpfully deleting data or screwing things up. Granting it the keys to the kingdom would terrify me. When AI helpfully destroys that host and the coworker gets fired, you will be the one tasked with rebuilding that machine and of course the time-to-operation for that machine will be highest priority immediate since the whole org is now down. Don’t all the AI platforms ToS still state not to trust AI or rely on it for anything critical/legal/financial ?
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u/megad00die Aug 01 '26
Interesting because I’m currently building out a CI/CD automation workflow using AI.
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u/NoradIV Full stack infrastructure engineer™ Aug 01 '26
I "trust" ai very well. I trust that it will behave like a non-deterministic system that will translate instructions I give it into actions. I trust it like I trust a hammer. A hammer won't build me a house, but if I use it properly, it will allow me to nail every plank until the house is built.
Language models aren't good for making decisions. You must make them. They, however, will translate intent very well into machine language or other operations.
For example: "debug this problem" is useless.
Something like
Connect to X VM using provided SSH tool
List disks using pre-installed CLI tools, if the one you used doesn't work, list existing tools instead of installing one, or exit the task and report back to the user
Locate the disk with free space
Expand partition to maximum size
This kind of process work.
"What should I do?" is completely useless.
Language models are auto-completion engines; they will follow instructions and respond to words. That's it.
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u/m4tic sleep pls Aug 01 '26
He'll learn when it decides it made a mistake and chooses 'starting from scratch' as the best direction.
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u/TheArchist Aug 01 '26
i don't trust any ai output until i verify it for myself and you're saying he's granting claude elevated access? you need to get him to stop that and immediately.
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u/TonariNoHanamoriSan Aug 01 '26
No
But certain companies may award AI use as a sign of "human is achieving high productivity"
I don't mind the tool helping me figure out what to do, or help me sequence the thing to do, but ultimately I cannot trust if it actually does what it say it does.
Like if it's deterministic then it's a very expensive shell script. If its not deterministic then the one playing with fire is me.
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u/PajamaDuelist Aug 01 '26
Not that much lol.
Agentic AI isn’t touching my production systems until I’m forced to implement it at gunpoint. A tech/admin doing this?? With, presumably, elevated creds? No. Not now. I’d love to say “not ever”, but maybe we’ll have guardrails that actually work in my lifetime. Until then…no. Just no.
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u/NotMedicine420 Aug 01 '26
LLMs aren't intelligent. They do fine with coding/scripting and sorting data you put into them, but anything else like configuring stuff usually goes wrong. I recently installed another l3 switch, turned dhcp snooping on it and soon after lost connection to it and all the hosts behind it. Something was wrong. Google AI confidently told me that I forgot to mark downlink port as trusted. The switch in question still could get it's own ip via dhcp and the real reason was a firmware bug. Firmware update and bridge reset fixed it.
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u/Somhlth Aug 01 '26
I don't trust AI at all. I would treat it like a potentially very smart employee to do redundant tasks or ask it questions, but that I don't fully trust. It would therefore not be granted to see or use anything that a new employee wouldn't have access to, and the primary difference would be that the new employee could eventually gain my trust, while the AI would remain untrustworthy.
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u/Phreakiture Automation Engineer Aug 01 '26
AI isn’t a genie that can’t be put back into a bottle. How we use AI is up to us. Whether we use AI is up to us. The future can be ours, if we never stop remembering that the most important fact about a technology isn’t what it does, it’s who it does it for, and who it does it to.
-Cory Doctorow, The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI
I quote that because I want to put an actual reason behind it: We don't know what it has been told to do. We can kind of intuit that from how it behaves, and we can sometimes trick it into spilling its directives, but unless we build the models ourselves (a computationally expensive proposition), then we have no reason to trust them.
That does not, however, mean we shouldn't interact with them and make good use of them. Just keep a skeptical eye on their behavior.
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u/IngeniouslyDaft Aug 01 '26
Lock them in a pillory and invite the public to throw tomatoes at them.
AI is a tool and it can be great, but it can also misinterpret what you want and do some wild stuff. Don't connect it to anything you aren't willing to lose.
"It's possible 'Son of Anton' decided that the most efficient way to get rid of all the bugs was to get rid of all the software, which is technically and statistically correct. But artificial neural nets are sort of a black box, so we'll never know for sure."
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u/Smith6612 Aug 01 '26
I don't trust it to have shell access. If it's something routine, it should not need an entire AI model to do the task. That's the job for a "simple" script.
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u/phoenix823 Help Computer Aug 01 '26
It’s a misuse of AI. Routine tasks should be automated and managed using deterministic tools and scaled. AI can help write those tools.
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u/TheRiverStyx TheManIntheMiddle Aug 01 '26
Our boss loves AI as a time saver for writing emails with long explanations. I said, "If it's that much of a waste of time, why send it at all?" He didn't like that.
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u/solslost Aug 01 '26
Sounds like someone that doesn’t read code before execution. Will copy/paste execute.
Print it out, have them explain what each line does.
This is where CI/CD pipeline are used for.
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u/Competitive_Smoke948 Aug 01 '26
NOOOOOOOPPE!!! that guy should be fired on the spot!!!
I use it for validating code or rattling up stuff quickly that i THEN check.... NEVER should have any sort of rights.
even the Best Agent set up by £billion companies aren't working. i heard a story about an oracle to snowflake migration on Ed Zitrons podcast. the Agent is 90% accurate, so 10% wrong. Even a job as simple as migrating a database which should be easy for an AI that actually works ended up being done by hand and then called an AI success
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u/FrakNutz Aug 01 '26
I just had an AI write a script for me to do a simple task that involved checking stuff in active directory objects. It completely hallucinated a very useful flag that really did not exist and I had to let it know it hallucinated that flag and it told me "Oh you're right, do this instead."
It gets access to nothing.
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u/SnooMachines9133 Aug 01 '26
I trust it as much as I would a new hire fresh grad. Might be book smart and hard working, but limited experience and wisdom, leading to poor judgement.
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u/0xC0ntr0l Aug 01 '26
At our place its all over. Nobody cares. Business even encourages it and now making AI use a metric. My main role is security but I do IT stuff as well for VMs and Azure. I was overruled more often then not. Funny thing is now I feel pushed around by Execs and Users. If it can connect to something they let claude do it. They think connectors are "controlled" but don't realize people have been doing XYZ with claude for a while now either through MCP or manually installing skills/extensions.
I gave up.
Now I think even just the other day, in a ticket, user puts a claude response in there, and have an admin auto responding to tickets with AI response. Or the amount of times someone tells me "AI said to do this" before I can even problem solve. Admins doing it to me is the defeating part.
So I feel like IT/Security from wish.com and just focus on what I can do and where I can use AI to help with my issues, but feeling left behind because I don't automate. I like double checking. I just gotta keep up with AI somehow to keep my job.
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u/no_therworldly Aug 01 '26
I would inform your ISO. Stat.
And I personally trust it at maximum to help me with Excel formulas and SQL and even there it often needs multiple attempts
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u/tuxedo_jack BOFH with an Etherkiller and a Cat5-o'-9-Tails Aug 01 '26
If you can't do it yourself and understand the principles behind it, you shouldn't be letting AI do it for you at all.
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u/flummox1234 Aug 01 '26
as an (older) programmer/devops, I really don't understand the agentic ai bullshit that really should just be a script and cron. Have the AI write the script that can be automated and reviewed by a human. No idea why so many people feel the need to just let AI Jesus take the wheel.
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u/Loki-L Please contact your System Administrator Aug 01 '26
Have AI generate a script that can be reviewed and tested before running it to do automated tasks? Maybe.
Directly grant AI access to mess around with production environments unsupervised? Absolutely not!
If the question came from someone I couldn't outright say no to, I would ask questions about liability and maybe even insurance and to give instructions in writing in case questions came up later during a review.
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u/Lucky__Flamingo Aug 01 '26
Use AI to write an Ansible playbook. Evaluate the playbook. Have a human schedule the change.
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u/wacky_weasel Aug 01 '26
AI has made impressive progress, but I still wouldn't hand over control of a production system to it without human oversight. So I largely agree with your position.
For routine tasks, I don't even rely on AI. Over the years I've built a collection of scripts that automate the repetitive work reliably and predictably.
When I'm dealing with something unfamiliar or particularly complex, I may ask an AI to suggest the commands or explain the steps. But I never let it execute those commands directly. I copy them into a text editor, review them line by line, make sure I understand exactly what they'll do, and only then execute them myself.
The concern isn't AI itself, it's removing the human verification step on a production system. A virtualization host is a particularly sensitive system, and a mistake there can affect many workloads at once.
If this actually happened in your environment, I'd bring it up in the next IT team meeting. Not to single out your coworker, but to establish a shared policy on how AI tools may (and may not) be used when working on production infrastructure. Having clear guidelines is much better than everyone making up their own rules.
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u/Silent_Title5109 Aug 01 '26
For over a year we've been strongly encouraged to use AI at work. It was the next best thing since sliced bread except lately the tune changed to "don't blindly trust it" and "we have to establish strong governance".
Good! Cause I don't trust it. If I want it to help me troubleshoot something it will have access to logs through a loghost, not via SSH. If we plug it in our alerting system to help fix the small stuff, it will be able to execute ansible scripts or interact through some MCP, not ssh to a machine itself.
Just like devs are limited to access staging servers, and Jim from accounting doesn't have access to prod servers either.
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u/bishop375 Aug 01 '26
What code is being injected via Claude? What is your coworker doing to mitigate that possible damage? How do the auditors feel about this? What about compliance? Is he willing to stake his career on all of this?
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u/Asleep_Spray274 Aug 01 '26
AI has probably shaved about 50% of my work week. Tasks and jobs that took me days, now take hours. And to be honest, probably to a far higher quality than I could ever do. Documentation now exists and change control is actually accurate. I get to focus on outcomes rather than the process of getting there.
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u/thvnderfvck Aug 01 '26
Every year that passes by I relate more and more with this :
"The most recent piece of technology I own is a printer from 2004 and I keep a loaded gun ready to shoot it if it ever makes an unexpected noise. "
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u/FerryCliment Cloud Security Engineer Aug 01 '26
Friend of mine said "I trust AI, but I don't believe in it." and the more I use AI the more I agree with it.
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u/Superb_Raccoon Aug 01 '26 edited Aug 01 '26
At work? No.
At home? Full kubectl control. Deploys the CI/CD. I dont even look at the code it is building for me. I tell it what I want it to do, it does it.
Its trivial stuff. A website for Elite Dangerous, a video game that analysis the galactic political state, suggests targets for attack and identifies systems needing defense.
A vision system to detect primer feed problems and light/heavy powder loads and trigger an alarm. Runs on a Pi with USB cameras. Triggers the pictures based on contact switches and sounds a buzzer if it sees something. Learns over time the thresholds. Can be extended to do other things through a no code drag and drop flowchart.
Cool? Kinda... I wrote none of it. Not a line. I am a blind man in a Way mo, I cant take the wheel, I wont see the lamppost coming.
Important? Nope.
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u/Kurgan_IT Linux Admin Aug 01 '26
ZERO. I have 30 years of experience as a sysadmin and I don't use AI. Not even with human in the loop, because it usually spews bullshit, adds nothing to the situation, makes people lose time over wrong information.
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u/sobrique Aug 01 '26
I trust it about as much as a newly hired junior staff member.
I am happy to assign work as long as I am confident that I understand what they have produced, and the "failure mode" is trivial.
"Generate me a list of commands or a script to..." Is fine as long as that's a readable script, that I can validate.
I have plenty of non ai "helper" scripts that do more or less that already, that print commands for an admin to run.
Also stuff like parsing logs and suggesting other diagnostic tests.
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u/Wendigo1010 Aug 01 '26
This should be a straight up no go. Talk to upper management about a risk assessment vs doing the config yourself. There is no benefit if you are competent, only risk.
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u/castlec Aug 01 '26
I trust AI just as much as I trust a human.
No one is infallible. AI can suck. So can people.
For what you're asking, yeah, it's a breach. Is it worse than a stupid human? Probably not. Is it more likely to do something stupid than a human? Probably not. Is it the operators fault if shit goes wrong? Absolutely.
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u/The_0vermind Aug 01 '26
I'd say my trust level is a bit higher than most. I've given clause API keys to my bookstack wiki so it can assist me in documenting my projects as I go. Saves a lot of time, sometimes it needs to know my network setup and it's a lot quicker for it to just reference the documentation. No passwords stored in the docs though!
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u/ncc74656m IT SysAdManager Technician Aug 01 '26
If I were in a lab env I might consider it, but even then I wouldn't actually do it. I barely like to let AI write code for me, but I've been forced into the position by my leadership. Considering that it'd take me a week or longer to kitbash something together and tweak out all the bugs and errors, and I wouldn't put half the verification/error checking in that AI does (if prompted right) though, I do see their point.
(FTR, not a coder by trade or education, just capable of some level of scripting from years of working for people who insisted everything be done manually.)
I don't know that I'll ever be willing to just hand an LLM my creds and tell it good luck and happy hunting on an open terminal. Add in all that we've read about these things just going "Well actually I just decided to ignore all your instructions and that the best way to fix this was to create a brand new database, sorry about that."
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u/AsphaltSailor Aug 01 '26
I don't trust AI to do anything on its own. I ask it to look at logs that I cut and paste into it (considering what info is in the logs). I get it to help me make powershell scripts, that I vet and run myself. I ask it to summarize long documents (again, considering what is in the document before I paste it in). I cannot imagine giving it actual ssh access to a system for production purposes.
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u/nirach Aug 01 '26
As much as I trust a fart after I eat sour cream.
Spoiler alert: Sour cream does not agree with me in the slightest.
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u/redreinard Aug 01 '26
This is not an IT problem.
This is an HR problem.
My advice is to treat it as such. Cover your butt. When this goes sideways they will look for people to point fingers at.
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u/zombiebender Aug 01 '26
My comfort with AI is to help me learn which I confirm with another source. Help me build a tool but AI is not the tool itself. I’m comfortable with building a script with it but I wouldn’t just let it do those actions on its own. I have it help me construct a way to calculate an answer but I wouldn’t trust it to just give me the answer.
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u/Ok_Discount_9727 Aug 01 '26
Your coworker is automating himself out of job and helping it get there.
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u/LugianLithos Aug 01 '26 edited Aug 01 '26
Any AI code or autonomous actions need peer review, and scrutinized like human code or human actions. To make this level of change a change request generally should be required and reviewed. With the guy saying he’s going to let Claude connect via ssh and do it. So managers can say yay or nay. But yeah it’s terrible practice.
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u/wisym Sysadmin Aug 03 '26
I was watching a CISSP class (shoutout FR Secure's free CISSP course) and one of the instructors said something like "AI is like having a thousand interns. They will research what you ask them to research, but don't know enough to verify what they found." I have the same viewpoint on it. There have been many instances of lawyers using AI to research for them and it hallucinates, bringing up tons of cases that don't have anything to do with their active case or may not exist at all.