Read before you roll out the guillotine! :p

I am a lifelong MS user. I cut my teeth on DOS 5, then everything from Win95 forward. Working in IT Ops, I’ve leveraged batch files and powershell many times in my career so I’m not afraid of the terminal but I’ve always focused on Windows as it was the tools of my trade. Therefore, I only ever dabbled in Ubuntu, Mint etc on secondary hardware.

In recent years I’ve moved away from Ops and my need to keep up-to-date with Windows has disappeared, I’m just a user now so in the middle of last year, I joined the fold and finished migrating all my hardware to Linux - I’ve been very comfortable ever since. Everything just worked including my favourite games and after a week I realized I would never go back.

I rocked Bazzite on my main PC and enjoyed the confidence that immutability gave me while learning - and it did save my backside when I made a largish mistake that cost me the ability to boot.  A couple of quick commands later and I was back in business.  I believe that an immutable distro + flatpack is the perfect starting point for most n00bs and average windows refugees.

I have since expanded my use and I reached a point where immutability was becoming a hurdle. There are ways around this but I didn’t want to complicate a beautiful thing so now I’ve come around full circle to my original choice in KDE Fedora.  Now that I’m several months in and 100% certain that I will never go back to Windows, I decided to start using the terminal to do things, as I’ve discovered that GUI applications are fine but the terminal is where the real power is unlocked.

My trouble is that I’m not 12 anymore attempting to learn DOS to move, rename, zip and delete files with near unlimited spare time with which to learn.  Typical Linux documentation is fantastically dense and guides or forum posts usually lead you down a path mostly blindfolded. The good ones explain what is happening but mostly in a summary way - so you must trust the source and hope nothing has changed between the date of publish and your version.

It’s then that I had a thought - AI is supposed to be good at this sort of stuff, let’s put that to the test.

I threw it a bunch of prompts. I wanted to mount a network share, rsync several folders to that share, create a log for monitoring, set it all up in a script and trigger it on a schedule.  I could do this in about 10mins in Windows but in Linux, I barely had a clue where to start - apart from rsync.

So, I leverage the AI and what it gave me was pure gold.  Not only giving me the commands I needed but also explaining what each portion of the script does - plus detail about how to dry run to ensure it would do as I needed - plus the source links to validate what it has told me.

Most of you are probably thinking “Big whoop, you discovered how to use basic Gen AI and have a cheat code. You haven’t learnt anything!” - and you’re 100% right!

While I could follow the overall premise of the scripts, I still had little idea what the commands and switches actually did. Previously, a lot of what I learned in DOS and powershell was taking other people’s work or scripts and Google bits to understand it enough that I could wield it myself and experiment, gradually expanding on it over time.  Sadly I don’t have that sort of time and luxury any more.  That’s when I realized I could leverage the real power of the AI tool.

I could use it as my own mentor, asking it 1000 obnoxious n00bie questions on the details of exactly what each command did, what every single line of the script did. I could ask it to explain in a different way or liken it to a concept I did understand and then feed it back my interpretation to check that I had the right idea.  What does that parameter actually do? What if I changed this? Etc.

Naturally curious, I have found myself annoying coworkers in the past, asking for this level of detail from them as I learn better in this way than reading documentation and struggling when I have gaps in my knowledge.

This was the sort of tool or mentor I’ve been wanting all my life and it’s my new Linux superpower.  Yes, I can cheat my way to the answer but more than that, I can also quickly break it down to understand exactly what I’m doing, so I’ll gradually learn more - and I keep my friends and co-workers on-side, only annoying them when I have really ugly problems!

Now I have my mentor, my next step is setting up a VM as a block of wood to practice my craft on!

I don’t want the AI forced on me like Windows is doing, but when I have a solid use case for it, I’m happy to go use it and leverage it to my benefit.

I’d be interested to know if anyone else has had similar experiences or has tried different ways of using AI for good rather than just slop.