This one is an opinion, and it is mine.
I use AI, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. It has let me dabble in areas I never thought possible. This website is one of them. So this is not a warning to stay away. AI is a great tool. My concern is with how we use it.
Help you do what you do, not replace it
Here is where I land: AI should not be used to replace what you do. It should be used to help you do what you do.
That sounds like a small difference. It is not. In the first case you hand over the work and stop thinking about it. In the second you are still the one doing the job. You just have a very fast assistant next to you, one that drafts, suggests and explains while you decide.
Do not let it work blind
The caution is simple. Do not let AI do things for you blindly.
In our line of work that matters more than most. A script that looks right can still be wrong for your environment. A command you do not understand is a command you cannot troubleshoot when it breaks something. And AI delivers a wrong answer with exactly the same confidence as a right one. If you cannot tell the difference, you are not using a tool. You are taking a chance.
So before you run it, ship it or send it:
- Read what it gave you. All of it, not just the part that looks like the answer.
- Understand what is being done. If there is a line you cannot explain, ask it to explain, then check that explanation against the documentation.
- Test it somewhere safe before it goes anywhere that matters.
- Own the result. “The AI wrote it” is not an answer anyone wants to hear after an outage. If you ran it, it is yours.
Learn from it
This is the part I care about most. Every time AI helps you with something, there is a lesson sitting right there. Why did it do it that way? What does that switch do? What would have happened without it?
If you take the answer and move on, you have finished one task. If you take the answer and understand it, you are better at your job tomorrow than you were today. Used the first way, AI makes you dependent on it. Used the second way, it is the most patient teacher you will ever have.
Keep the value in you
Understanding what you do is what keeps the value in you and not in the AI.
Anyone can paste a question into a chat window. If that is all you bring, there is not much separating you from the next person who can do the same. What makes you valuable is that you know what the answer means, whether it is right, how it fits your environment, and what to do when it fails. AI does not take that away from you. You can only give it away, by no longer learning.
The short version: use AI to help you do your work, not to do it for you. Understand everything it hands you. Never stop learning.
That is my take. I would like to hear yours. How are you using AI in your work, and where do you draw the line? Come and tell us in the General forum.
Karl