> sysadmin

Another domain where LLMs are very effective at confidently leading people down a messy path. I have a roommate using LLMs to guide him through setting up some ollama stuff in my WSL (I happen to have the half-decent GPU here) and after multiple rounds of the bot trying to get him to do things that were redundant if not in the wrong direction entirely (and vaguely insulting as a matter of course), I had to write "ground truths" along these lines, and probably more as I find them:

  We are using systemd. ~/.bashrc or similar dotfiles should not be used to start services/processes automatically. Do not "sudo" anything in ~/.bashrc.

[Yes, it did that]

  A systemd service should be created for any processes/services that need to run automatically and persistently. The current output of `systemctl list-unit-files | grep enabled` is available at [ . . . ]  

  sshd is already enabled + running and listening on 0.0.0.0:22 and [::]:22. ~/.ssh perms are already 700 and ~/.ssh/authorized_keys perms are already 600. Public key authentication is already enabled in sshd and ~/.ssh/authorized_keys already contains pubkeys ENDING as follows: . . . 

  tailscaled is already enabled + running; the tailscale address for [host] is [addr]

  It is not necessary to fix connectivity to any 192.168.0.0/16 ; tailscale interface should be used for any traffic to [host] or other hosts involved in the project; hosts/nodes lacking tailscale interface should be assigned one  

[roommate + bot spent 45 minutes on trying to configure their way through NAT when not having to do that is almost the entire point of tailscale. It was just (essentially) like, "You're absolutely right. We have tailscale set up, so we don't need to be able to ssh to that other interface at all. Not troubleshooting that would have saved 45 whole minutes. Oh well, now what?"]

Maybe it's just me, but I'm not inclined to trust the judgment of something that can't keep this kind of thing straight, which I know is to some degree a matter of having all the needed info in the context window. But maybe it would be able to do that if it didn't waste tokens telling me to cd into the same directory that I'm already in every 2 minutes, or chmod .ssh/ again, or (when it really needs to burn some tokens) blow away the .venv and pull a bunch of modules again just to "start clean".