this post was submitted on 27 Apr 2026
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This isn't an AI story, it's a "completely fucking idiotic sysadmins exist" story.
Treat an AI like the idiot intern without any references you just hired. Gave the idiot intern permission to delete your production database? That's entirely on you, zero sympathy. (Actually, give any developer that power? You get what you deserve.)
Problem is execs and stupid software devs wanna give these things full reign on systems because of “performance gainz “
It’s a collective stupidity that’s impossible to break because it’s hooked into the highest decision makers.
“Treat an AI like an idiot intern without any references you just hired.”
Instead of this, treat AI like some dude off the street who you didn’t hire and leave it out of your life. It’s shitty, it’s wasteful, and it’s subsidized by everyone to get a few tech bros rich.
Like seriously, it’s just theft of people’s work it “trained on”, powered by energy companies that charge us more to power it, at the cost of poisoning our water supplies, to ultimately try and steal our salaries one day.
It’s absolutely parasitic software at every level.
Hah, you just wrote a punchline similar to a presentation I've been giving at conferences.
I mean that's kinda the whole point.
Companies are looking at AI to replace people. Either it's ready or it's not.
If you need to treat it like it's an intern, then it's not worth the expense. Anyone hiring interns to be productive doesn't understand why you hire an intern.
Right now it's somewhere between a smart intern and a smart recent grad. A lot depends on what Skills.md and frameworks your org has set up.
No it's not. You're giving it way too much credit.
People don't wanna hear that around here. But I agree, with the right instructions it's better than a junior Dev. Loads faster, and mistakes can be fixed faster, and if you update the prompts then it learns better from mistakes too.
People don't want to hear it anywhere because you're lauding the benefits of a parasitic technology which is inherently hostile towards workers.
And if you're getting paid for it, it makes you a parasite too, or at least more complicit than the average person.
The fact is, it can be a very useful technology when deployed sensibly. Yes, it's going to inflict massive harm on society in multiple ways - but just dismissing it as shit is putting your head in the sand. We need to be figuring out how to ensure that the harm it does is minimised and ideally that it's used in ways that benefit us all. Fuck knows how though.
But it's not just going to go away, no matter how much we might want it to.
I honestly think, it's very cool for prototyping ideas at this point. It's also parasitic. Although I think because of (maybe) different reasons: It gives people the power (which they unfortunately use way too much) to imitate an art, but in an non-arty imperfect way that doesn't comprehend details (of the art), resulting in slop. For software that can go very wrong as we see here. This is also a reason why I mostly quit open-source, because now everyone can code a bad version of a library, it sucked the art out of good open source etc. and it's increasingly difficult because of good wording/"look" etc. to differentiate on quality of code, previously you could often check a code-base review it somewhat and know how good the quality is, now it's more like "is this slop or not?" (in which case I go a big circle around it, because reviewing is often not worth it)
At some point though, I think this automation of work is inevitable, we need to think about a society that can peacefully exist without having the requirement to work to exist. I actually think this could easily be utopian, everyone can focus on what they actually think is fulfilling life.
Though, it's sad and concerning that technology is developing faster than society can adapt, which is why I'm mostly with you, because people (or representatives like politicians) just aren't "programmed" for these fast-paced changes, to adapt the technology such that the future may be more utopian as it currently is heading towards a dystopian future...
It could be a moronic sysadmin, it could just as easily be a moronic exec pushing staff to implement this crap right now and damn the consequences.
My company is in the process of pivoting hard to Claude after 50yrs of doing virtually everything themselves and rolling their own versions of already-existing software, and this is almost verbatim how I've described to others what it feels like to use it.
It feels like cajoling an intern to understand a job for which they have some average skill but zero motivation, and they only want to do the bare minimum, so you spend all the time you could be doing your job holding their hand through basic tasks.
It's fucking annoying.
negl sounds like you need to spend some time writing good documentation. May as well do it in the form of Skills files so humans and bots both are more quickly able to be useful in your org.
I was once the intern who did relatively stupid things with one very big consequence.
My biggest fuckup was unplugging a 10base2 (edit: I originally wrote 10-base-T) coax wire from the loop so I could plug in a newly built computer. Everyone at the time (including me) knew that an unterminated 10-base-T network would crash Win 3.11, so the accepted process was to tell the entire network you were about to disconnect a cable so they could save their work and be ready to drop to DOS. I spaced that step in my haste to test a newly built computer and ruined a day's worth of work by the sales guy.
Ultimately, I was the one who fucked up and did know better. That's AI. However, it only had consequences because Win 3.11 networking code was fucking awful and because the sales guy didn't save his work frequently. If the same person in this story had asked Claude whether it was a good idea to have the backup and production databases on the same volume, the AI would have said No. If the person had asked Claude whether it was a good idea to delete a database without any confirmation dialogue, the AI would have said No. AI did it anyway. That's what makes this an AI story.
Was their database environment stupid? Yes. Did the sysadmin fuck up by not treating AI like an intern? Yes. Did the AI do something it knew it shouldn't do? Also yes. This is both an AI story and stupid sysadmin story.
Fun fact: giving developers access to production deployments violates FedRAMP and like half a dozen other compliance regimes SOC2/IRAP/ISMAP/G-Cloud/BSI C5/...
But it doesn't mean it isn't incredibly common. Especially with "DevOps" where the developers are pushed to handle literally every aspect.
IMO DevOps was always a stupid idea. Impedance mismatch.
Developers who are really good at designing complex enterprise-level shit need days-to-weeks of uninterrupted time to think and experiment. Please, skip the daily stand-up until you've figured out how to fix
Coders who are good at fixing bugs or adding a new menu item need a few hours or a day uninterrupted. Daily stand-up, should have closed yesterday's ticket or have hit a real roadblock with it.
Ops IT people are fixing like 4 fires at the literal same time, they are lucky to get minutes of uninterrupted thinking time. It's about managing rate of tickets per day, and in contrast going full CAPA when there's a significant outage.
Just... totally different workflows, personalities, and management
It's both.