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Comment by nickphx | Hacker News Reader

oh boy, how amazing... an llm managed to generate some iptables rules and sysctl settings that have been well documented for years..

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If you are starting from relative ignorance about the topic, then yes, it is amazing.

But it does mean that the user can build a solution that they don’t understand well enough to maintain.

indeed.

I've experimented with using LLM to setup and/or maintain some servers for me for various different use cases (this being one). What I like is an agentic LLM can either document it's initial build process or "explore" your server to better understand how it works, what configuration files are used, software versions installed, etc. When you have that documentation/context provided to a frontier LLM it can take care of most maintenance work you'd like do by hand for "simple" servers. A good prompt to get an llm to explore an existing server to make sure it fully understands it is to ask it to make a working backup.

I’ve done the same, and in the process learned some things. Which is amazing! But it’s easy and tempting to do minimal learning and accept the working shell script or whatever. The better the AI gets, the more tempting that is.

And a really dreary blog describing something simple at great length :/

Maybe I didn't make it clear from the post, the llm (cursor+claude 4.5 sonet) was actually driving the whole process from provisioning a server, installing wireguard, setting up certificates, configuring network, installing packages, and updating security - with some testing at each step. I never ran any commands manually, I just told it what to do.

And Dropbox is an afternoon project for any Linux user, right? Right?

If you believe the two are similar in complexity and effort, you have much to learn.

I believe your comment pattern matches to the classic comment 9224, was the point I was making. Yes, this might be easy for you.

> an llm managed to generate some iptables rules and sysctl settings that have been well documented for years..

> you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem.

But the whole point of the blog post is that a person who didn't know how to do it did the thing. If the thing is the goal, they succeeded. They now have a thing they didn't have before, after not knowing how to do that thing. A new capability was unlocked by the LLM.

Please generalize this.

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