haha, yeah I am well aware I could do something like that. Unfortunately, once you start working for larger companies, your options for solutions to problems typically shrink dramatically and also need to fit into neat little boxes that someone else already drew. And our environment rules are so draconian, that we cannot use k8s to its fullest anyhow. Most of the people I work with have never actually touched k8s, much less any kind of server oriented UNIX. Thanks for the advice though.

This kinda functionality is surprisingly apropos to a problem I have a work, I realize. And yet, I have k8s. More and more I am appreciating the niche systemd can play with pets instead of cattle and wished corps weren’t jumping to managed k8s and all of that complexity it entails immediately.

It makes somewhat passable mediocrity, very quickly when directly used for such things. The stories it writes from the simplest of prompts is always shallow and full of cliche (and over-represented words like “delve”). To get it to write good prose basically requires breaking down writing, the activity, into its stream of constituent, tiny tasks and then treating the model like the machine it is. And this hack generalizes out to other tasks, too, including writing code. It isn’t alive. It isn’t even thinking. But if you treat these things as rigid robots getting specific work done, you can make then do real things. The problem is asking experts to do all of that labor to hyper segment the work and micromanage the robot. Doing that is actually more work than just asking the expert to do the task themselves. It is still a very rough tool. It will definitely not replace the intern, just yet. At least my interns submit code changes that compile.

Don’t worry, human toil isn’t going anywhere. All of this stuff is super new and still comparatively useless. Right now, the early adopters are mostly remixing what has worked reliably. We have yet to see truly novel applications yet. What you will see in the near future will be lots of “enhanced” products that you can talk to. Whether you want to or not. The human jobs lost to the first wave of AI automation will likely be in the call center. The important industries such as agriculture are already so hyper automated, it will take an enormous investment to close the 2% left. Many, many industries will be that way, even after AI. And for a slightly more cynical take: Human labor will never go away because having power over machines isn’t the same as having power over other humans. We won’t let computers make us all useless.

You’re aware Linux basically runs the Internet World, right?

Billions of devices run Linux. It is an amazing feat!