I saw this in my feed reader and thought that somehow a Benj Edwards post had gotten past my RSS feed filters but no, it's Lee
jesus motherfucking christ
see, like Lee I am a sysadmin who is bad at programming, always have been, I haven't written anything more than simple Bash and Python scripts
so I am the target demographic for this blog post and as such it is pissing me off *more* than your average programmer writing a post about how they vibe-coded a thing
"And I had fun doing these things, even as entire vast swaths of rainforest were lit on fire to power my agentic adventures."
If *this* is the conclusion you come to then you need to stop writing, go stare at a wall and contemplate the choices that brought you to this completely unhinged, abhorrent conclusion.
Instead, you published this publicly on a popular site.
"LLMs can be fantastic if you’re using them to do something that you mostly understand. If you’re familiar enough with a problem space to understand the common approaches used to solve it, and you know the subject area well enough to spot the inevitable LLM hallucinations and confabulations, and you understand the task at hand well enough to steer the LLM away from dead-ends and to stop it from re-inventing the wheel, and you have the means to confirm the LLM’s output, then these tools are, frankly, kind of amazing."
If, and, if, and. So many caveats. So if you ignore *the numerous problems*, it is *kind of* amazing. Uh huh. That's what we are supposed to take away from this.
Somehow "amazing" is not the descriptor I would use for something that behaves like this.
"I am a better sysadmin than I was before agentic coding because now I can solve problems myself that I would have previously needed to hand off to someone else."
No, it didn't make you a better sysadmin. At best you are the same level of sysadmin you were before you did this. At worst, you regressed your problem solving skills.
Being a good sysadmin means knowing the limits of one's skills and knowledge. To be able to go, "okay, I can't figure this out, lemme ask another person for help". That is not something to be ashamed of or a mark of incompetence.
Did you ask someone else for help? Another sysadmin? Maybe a programmer friend to help with the colorizer? Go on IRC, forums, hell even Stack Overflow? A log colorizer is a solved problem.
I deal with cache invalidation issues in relation to WordPress sites and Cloudflare at my day job, and there other people like me who could have helped you with the underlying problem with caching you were trying to figure out.
Instead, you went about it the most roundabout, inefficient way possible and when the plagiarism machine gave you a colorizer, it was *you* that used your experience and knowledge to find the issue, not the LLM.
@packetcat I would argue asking someone competent for help (and learning from that) makes one a better sysadmin
