Small-scale SysAdmin here, couple hundred VMs on ~15 physical machines plus AWS, Linux, 30+ years under my belt. I'm using the AI tools a lot, I've tried many

Small-scale SysAdmin here, couple hundred VMs on ~15 physical machines plus AWS, Linux, 30+ years under my belt. I'm using the AI tools a lot, I've tried many of them but my go-tos are Perplexity and ChatGPT. Here are some samplings of what I use it for: I use Perplexity for ~90% of what I used to hit google for. Perplexity will answer your question but it also gives you links to pages for further reference, which makes it useful to see additional context. Questions like "How do I import indexes from an old Elastic cluster into a new one". I use it a lot as documentation replacement: we collaborated on a logstash regex using non-capturing look-behind (not something I keep at my fingertips), "how do I use imagemagick to scale an image to 1024x768", "how do I use argparse to do X". Where before I'd end up reading through documentation, the genAI stuff can basically write me a custom "Stack Overflow-like" answer for my question, but honestly the AIs tend to halucinate less than Stack Overflow does. I have passable luck having it explain error messages to me. That's maybe 50/50. As a primarily Linux guy, working a little with Windows, it's a huge help, particularly with Powershell automation. I barely know any Powershell, and I use Windows little enough that it doesn't tend to "stick", and isn't worth doing a deep dive into, so usually I can collaborate with the AIs to get some scripting done. I don't do a lot of programming on a daily basis, but when I do I use AIs a lot. I've had some success with it spitting out code, for example I wanted a small CLI tool like "sleep" but I wanted it to sleep until 8:30pm, and show a count-down TUI, and ChatGPT spit out the code for it using the "rich" TUI from a couple sentences and was basically correct. When I am programming, I'm using the Cursor IDE a fair bit. This is mostly Python, which seems to be a sweet spot for the genAIs, Python is a first class citizen with them. edit: Forgot to mention, I built a git+jira integration TUI, using ChatGPT, which uses ChatGPT to help craft my commit messages, *but* I haven't really found that to be as useful as I was hoping it would be. https://github.com/linsomniac/lazrgit https://github.com/linsomniac/lazrgit