alt Hacker NewsDefine "discredit". Define "rely". I administer some servers and a few classrooms at my uni, along with two colleagues. This is not my primary job. This is not anyone's primary job. We went from a bunch of ad hoc solutions with shell scripts that sort of kept everything together to an entirely declarative system, with centralized accounts, access control and floating homes using Ansible, FreeIPA, NFSv4 w/ Kerberos etc. For bringing up a new classroom computer, we went from hard-cloning the hard disk with clonezilla to installing Ubuntu, enrolling the key and running the ansible install everything playbook.
This is serious. Researchers and educators rely on these systems every day to do their jobs. Tell me why this work should be discredited. Because I used AI (followed by understanding what it did, testing, a lot of tuning, a lot of changes, a lot of "how would that work" conversations, a lot of "what are the pros and cons" conversations)?
How about we just discredit the lazy use of AI instead?
Should high school kids who copy paste Wikipedia and call it their essay mean we should discredit Wikipedia?
Well, that's the thing — if you understand the technology you're working with and know how to verify the result, chances are, completing the same task with AI would take you longer than without it. So the whole appeal of AI seems to be to let it do things without much oversight.
The common failure mode of AI is also concerning. If you ask it to do something that can't be done trivially or at all, or wasn't present enough in the learning dataset, it often wouldn't tell you it doesn't know how to do it. Instead, it'll make shit up with utmost confidence.
Just yesterday I stumbled upon this article that closely matches my opinion: https://eev.ee/blog/2025/07/03/the-rise-of-whatever/