Of course it sounds out of touch. I didn’t say it, or anything like it. Just like the other commenter, you seem to have stopped after the first sentence.

20 years of IT experience from a support perspective does qualify me to put anybody in the programming space on notice. The tools might not be as good as a talented and well trained dev, but they’re already better than a lazy dev. The output I get from Claude Code takes effort to get running. It just takes less of it than the output from my outsourced offshore MSP.

It’s an Isaac Asimov story. An excellent one I cite frequently with regards to human ability to cope with increasing rate of change.

I’ve never been able to program in anything more complex than BASIC and command line batch files, but I’m able to get useful output from Claude.

I’m an IT Infrastructure Manager by trade, and I got there through 20 years of supporting everything from desktop to datacenter including weird use cases like controlling systems in a research lab. On top of that, I’ve gotten under the hood of software in the form of running game servers in my spare time.

What you need to get good programs out of AI boils down to 3 things:

1. The ability to teach an entity whose mistakes resemble those of a gifted child where it went wrong a step or ten back from where it’s currently looking.
2. The ability to provide useful beta test / debug output regarding programs which aren’t behaving as expected. This does include looking at an error log and having some idea what that error means.
3. Comfort using (either executing or compiling depending on the language) source code associated with the language you’re doing things in. This might be as simple as “How do I run a Powershell script or verify that I meet the version and module requirements for the script in question?”, or it might be as complicated as building an executable in Visual Studio. Either way whatever the pipeline is from source to execution, it must be a pipeline you’re comfortable working with. If you’re doing things anywhere outside the IT administration space, it’s reasonable to be looking at Python as the best first path rather than Powershell. Personally, I must go where supported first party modules exist for the types of work I’m developing around. In IT Administration, that’s Powershell.

I’ve made tools which automate and improve my entire department’s approach to user data, device data, application inventory, patch management, vulnerability management, and these are changes I started making with a free product three months ago, and two months back I switched to the paid version.

Programming is sort of like conversation in an alien language. For that reason, if you can give precise instructions sometimes you really can pull something new into existence using LLM coding. It’s the same reason that you could say words which have never been said in that specific order before, and have an LLM translate them to Portuguese.

I always used to talk about how everything in a computer was math, and that what interested me more than quantum computing would be a machine which starts performing the same sorts of operations on words or concepts that computers of that day ('90s and '00s when “quantum” was being slapped on everything to mean “fast” or “powerful”) were doing on math. I said that the best indicator when linguistic computing arrives would be that without ever learning to program, I’d start being able to program. I was looking at “Dragon Naturally Speaking” when I had this idea. It was one of the earliest effective speech to text programs. I stopped learning to program immediately and focused exclusively on learning operations from that point forward.

I’ve been testing the code generation abilities of LLMs for about three years. Within the last six months I feel like I’m starting to see evidence that the associations being made internally by LLMs are complex enough to begin considering them the fulfillment of my childhood dream of a “word computer”.

All the shitty stuff about environment and theft of art is all there too, which sucks, but more because our economic model sucks than because LLMs either do or do not suck. If we had a framework for meeting everybody’s basic needs, this software in its current state has the potential to turn everyone with a passion for grammatical and technical precision into a concept based developer practically overnight.

That’s a dang odd thing for a US market segment to initiate on a global scale shortly before the country kicks off war on a new front or two…

The words are all still stupid because it’s a new thing, but there is one specific space that I find it just impossible to deny the way that there are already tools on the market that change the way the job is done:

Claude can turn plain english statements about what data I want from what different parts of the Microsoft 365 administration ecosphere into scripts that take all that data, transform it the way I want it transformed, and turn it into spreadsheets, pivot tables, data manipulation macros, and everything else I need to answer questions which are really hard to answer from the MS web interface. I can ask things like “Which systems have any of these three known vulnerable apps?” or “What software is common to everyone working in this division of the company?”

It’s boring stuff, but it makes a world of difference in terms of what I can look at to base my decisions on. I spent less time building repeatable reports for each type of object I need to think about (device, application, user) than I did building even one report for one assessment in years past without automation. And it’s not constantly asking the LLM to do things for me, it’s building a couple of tools with a much faster iterative process for feature tweaks or debugging than could take place as an interaction between two people. I was making changes to scripts

I’m using it only for specific work areas where I already know the APIs I just don’t have the time to stumble through the gather and collate of the various data. Based on the level of complexity of the tools I’ve been able to build I would say that anybody who knows how to describe the data they work with most could use a tool like this to make that process a lot more automatic. We’re not ready for the tool to do the work without human oversight, but we’re ready for anybody who works with stacks of data to build their own automation instead of having it built for them.

I’ve lived a relatively low injury life, and I think you’re sleeping on some pretty obvious universal but forgettable experiences.

If I just consider what it would feel like to experience all of my sunburns, paper cuts, back problems, mosquito bites, and situations where I’ve been hit in the nuts or had the wind knocked out of me…

If the shock of experiencing all that minor stuff at once isn’t enough to take me out, it’d at least be agonizing enough that I might shoot myself just to get a little relief.

Never forget the primary lesson of Vietnam.

They draft, you frag.

When Weird Al tries that, somehow he circles right back around to “right”.