So the biggest change is the day to day workflow change of just pumping out little powershell scripts for whatever I need and not building those scripting skills or performing the manual rote admin work. Rather than manually expand a disk in the hypervisor and then sshing in and expanding the partition and filesystem Claude spits out a one liner and I run it. While not challenging or particularly rewarding those trivial tasks are a soothing part of the constant flow of work that i didn’t dislike. Solid things in which i understood every aspect becomes a black box that does it for me and i have to reinterrogate or accept it, and in which it’ll never be worth the time to learn myself.

As for the deeper work, the most recent example I have is deploying an observability stack for our lab cluster. In the past i would have done way more upfront work on understanding the alternatives and the deployment. I would have known every line of config before pressing deploy including the ones I chose not to set. The why and how of everything. Now the most efficient way is just to tell Claude to stand up a monitoring stack in the manner that apps are already deployed on the cluster and iterate with Claude once it’s up and running. Why bother diving deep when you can be running a proof of concept in five minutes and then just see if it falls over.

Another part of it is that i really dislike learning through a prompt. I don’t like summaries, i like man pages. I don’t want to interrogate a result i want to provide a complete solution.

Part of it too is I’m fairly new to all this professionally. I’ve only been at it 5 years, though hobby much longer. Basically i can feel myself growing and getting better and now suddenly there’s this genius moron in my pocket that so much better than I ever dreamed I could be while simultaneously having huge shortfalls. It’s a just an instant paradigm shift and after the first week of glee it’s not been a positive feeling.

It’s not that my existing knowledge isn’t relevant at all, there’s still a huge base of networking and systems knowledge that’s necessary. It’s routinely surprised me in my career when i speak with a greybeard developer who is a an absolute wizard to me but dns/tcp etc are just a black box to them. Or when I talk to a friend new into the selfhosting hobby and i try to explain something to them that think is simple and i realize there’s 10 years of accumulated knowledge underneath that simple concept in order to actually grok it.

I don’t know if that answered your question, just an unstructured ramble. I think the heart of it is that googling and research and things being concrete and complete understandings of workings and interactions and variables and secrets and configs etc are giving way to a black box pumping out systems and it mostly working out of the box and often that is simply good enough for now and it’s on to the next thing.