Down an AI Rabbit Hole

It's a Schrödinger's cat of helpful unhelpfulness

It will come as no surprise to anyone who knows me that I have a home lab. I have been hosing a personal web server of one kind or another since not long after I registered my first domain, and that was just before Christmas in 1998. With all of the new technology I decided it was time to update my home lab in multiple ways, one of them being my network. I did my research and, as an experiment, ran my thoughts past a couple of different AI models and they all said the same thing, what I was thinking about was spot on.

I ended up getting an Omada Controller, Router and smart switch. I put a lot of thought into how I was going to configure my network, using VLANs to separate network traffic. And that was all well and good until the hardware arrived. Had I been able to ask a human being who had done this, I would have saved myself a lot of grief but I wanted to see if it was possible to actually do this with AI only support.

Let’s start with the less than intuitive way that one sets up the controller, router and switch. I wiped the configs clean and started from scratch 27 times, I kept count. It was a lot of really small things that kept causing problems. Then, once I had the configuration where I thought it needed to be, I was ready to replacing my existing network with the newly built one. It took a weekend and there were a lot of conversations that went like this:

Me: Why can’t I connect to this computer with this IP Address?
AI: That’s an excellent question. Here is how we can troubleshoot.
Me: Here’s the result of the trouble shooting.
AI: Great! Try this.

It turns out, when all was said and done, that the issue was not within the newly built network but within the existing configuration of the server. So we worked on that, with multiple AI models breezily telling me, “Of course, that makes sense, the problem has to be…” And it never was. I finally ended up just blowing away almost every server and reinstalling from scratch. Had there been a knowledgeable human involved I am almost positive there would have been a range of experience to draw on that would have provided a less drastic solution. AI, however, is focused on what you tell it the problem is and has trouble seeing beyond those parameters.

I still don’t have my websites up and running. Those will be put back up this weekend. And there is some really interesting new content coming, starting Thursday, about where vibe coding will take you. Summed up by my new motto:

Sunt rationes cogitandi, sed agnitio rationum non est cogitare.

In English:

Patterns belong to the structure of thinking itself; recognizing them is not the same as performing thought