I have found Claude Code is a great help to me. Yes, I can and have tinkered a lot over the decades, but I am perfectly happy letting Claude drive the system administration, and advise on best practices. Certainly for prototype configurations. I can install CC on all VPSes and local machines. NixOS sounds great, but the learning curve is not fun. I installed the CC package from the NixOS unstable channel and I don't have to learn the funky NixOS packaging language. I do have to intervene sometimes as the commands go by, as I know how to drive, so maybe not a solution for true newbies. I can spend a few hours learning how to click around in one of the cloud consoles, or I can let CC install the command line interfaces and do it for me. The $20/mo plan is plenty for system administration and if I pick the haiku model, then CC runs twice as fast on trivial stuff like system administration.

Let's take an example: a managed database, e.g. Postgres or MySQL, vs. a self-hosted one. If you need reasonable uptime, you need at least one read replica. But replication breaks sometimes, or something goes wrong on the master DB, particularly over a period of years.

Are you really going to trust Claude Code to recover in that situation? Do you think it will? I've had DB primaries fail on managed DBs like AWS RDS and Google Cloud SQL, and recovery is generally automatic within minutes. You don't have to lift a finger.

Same goes for something like a managed k8s cluster, like EKS or GKE. There's a big difference between using a fully-managed service and trying to replicate a fully managed system on your own with the help of an LLM.

Of course it does boil down to what you need. But if you need reliability and don't want to have to deal with admin, managed services can make life much simpler. There's a whole class of problems I simply never have to think about.