I gave Claude a shot at guiding me through an install of a matrix home server the other day. It got about halfway through before it absolutely shat itself. I mean like going in circles and completely incapable of breaking itself out.
And that’s for a fairly easy sysadmin task. Not even doing it right, just doing it to the point where the service can be brought up and be accessible. I cannot believe anyone is under the impression that these bots are going to take anyone’s jobs. The only thing that’s going to “destroy jobs” is the rabid desperation management has to destroy labor.
I did the same thing a few days ago, but I’m also pretty well versed with self hosting tedious-to-configure services. I would have spent hours rabbit-holing before setting up, and Claude just sped up the process.
I spent most of my time researching and forming an action plan, arguably the most important piece. Within two hours I had a Matrix server stood up with element-web, as well as coturn for calls. Setting up Element-Call for groups took a little longer, but not terrible all told.
I guess what I’m saying is if you’re experienced with a given task, it can be a really great tool to speed things along. If you want to sit back and have it run the show, you’re going to have a rough time.
Yeah that’s a common issue I’ve seen with Gemini and ChatGPT as well. They can do simple tasks but as soon as it’s something that requires more than a 5-6 steps, or if there are complications along the way they will get lost. Also ChatGPT will commonly just make up commands if it doesn’t actually know how to do something.
I will say that after I went back to my normal usage pattern of going as far as I could alone and then asking the chatbot what went wrong it did save me a ton of time by suggesting I check whether caddy was importing from conf.d, which it wasn’t.
I would have gotten there eventually, but not was it nice not having to hunt through snarky unhelpful forum comments on my own.
I just did a long winded reply to your other comment before seeing this one. Seems like we landed in the same place! Hope the server is working well you
I gave Claude a shot at guiding me through an install of a matrix home server the other day. It got about halfway through before it absolutely shat itself. I mean like going in circles and completely incapable of breaking itself out.
And that’s for a fairly easy sysadmin task. Not even doing it right, just doing it to the point where the service can be brought up and be accessible. I cannot believe anyone is under the impression that these bots are going to take anyone’s jobs. The only thing that’s going to “destroy jobs” is the rabid desperation management has to destroy labor.
I did the same thing a few days ago, but I’m also pretty well versed with self hosting tedious-to-configure services. I would have spent hours rabbit-holing before setting up, and Claude just sped up the process.
I spent most of my time researching and forming an action plan, arguably the most important piece. Within two hours I had a Matrix server stood up with element-web, as well as coturn for calls. Setting up Element-Call for groups took a little longer, but not terrible all told.
I guess what I’m saying is if you’re experienced with a given task, it can be a really great tool to speed things along. If you want to sit back and have it run the show, you’re going to have a rough time.
Yeah that’s a common issue I’ve seen with Gemini and ChatGPT as well. They can do simple tasks but as soon as it’s something that requires more than a 5-6 steps, or if there are complications along the way they will get lost. Also ChatGPT will commonly just make up commands if it doesn’t actually know how to do something.
I will say that after I went back to my normal usage pattern of going as far as I could alone and then asking the chatbot what went wrong it did save me a ton of time by suggesting I check whether caddy was importing from
conf.d, which it wasn’t.I would have gotten there eventually, but not was it nice not having to hunt through snarky unhelpful forum comments on my own.
I just did a long winded reply to your other comment before seeing this one. Seems like we landed in the same place! Hope the server is working well you