I’ve been in engineering long enough to know it’s cyclical: the new thing always eats layers that demanded expertise until it demands expertise, at which point

I’ve been in engineering long enough to know it’s cyclical: the new thing always eats layers that demanded expertise until it demands expertise, at which point something new tries eating that layer. It was shell scripting until it became Ansible, until it became HCL, until it became K8s, until Helm, until AGENTS.md, until…well, until we wound up back at building images again for local compute because cloud costs are spiraling upward and privacy/sovereignty are the focus again. It’s kind of ironic that, for all the expertise I’ve cultivated, all the skills I’ve grown, all the knowledge I’ve gained, I’ve found myself back at the start of my career cycle again in terms of manually defining and building OS images for virtualization on local hardware. AI has not been much help in this regard because of the hundreds of OS settings I have to understand and set according to security posture - I’ve been unable to get Claude/Qwen/etc to build an effective hardening profile for something as fundamental as CIS2, because it always presumes an AD environment on a CSP as opposed to a local VM. Believe me, I would love for it to do so, because this is dry, uninteresting work, but I’ve spent more time wrangling AI than I would’ve spent writing my own Powershell. AI is, at least in my realm, a neat tool for basic, repetitive, boilerplate work. Very much a sudo make me a sandwich type of deal, except for YAML. That’s not me knocking the tool, just my two cents on what function it serves at present. Put another way: we wouldn’t have made our sixth hire a Support staffer if AI could do more.