> There are probably more effective methods of achieving the same, but it costs us less than a dollar to provision 50 servers using Claude to screen-scrape every minute during the install.<p>I think this is an important thing to remember/consider. I can't tell you how many personal projects I've stalled on worrying about costs "XYZ service/platform/API is expensive" without considering what "expensive" actually means.<p>Yes, they could have used OCR/image recognition-type software but what's easier than piping an image to an API and asking it?<p>LLMs frustrate me with their inconsistency/"fuzziness" (repeating instructions, putting them in all caps, saying "please" just rubs me the wrong way) but I know personally I have a bad habit of "That would be too expensive" or "How does it scale to X" when neither the cost nor the scale would ever be a real issue in the thing I'm writing.
Using Claude to parse screen-scrapes of a server's boot status is certainly novel. I did not expect a mention of AI usage in an article like this.<p>With that said, I wonder why they used AI at all here. Could they not have keyed off certain keywords or other information present in a screen scrape, rather than rely on Claude to parse it?
Great writeup even though the dots aren’t connected between a lot of the aspects presented. Didn’t know about udev exposing consistent device names for network interfaces for example, or the efforts to open source switch software, or how easy it’s become to run intra-datacenter BGP. Thanks for all the links!<p>And of course the brilliant use of AI and discussion of how cost-effective it is. “Hook it up to an AI to save money” is the world we can look forward to. In this case the problem is recognizing which state a thing is in from a list of known states. Once the LLM gives the state in text form, all kinds of automation are unlocked. I think that class of problem - converting a state based on an image into text form - is wildly common, and will be on the lookout for it in my own automation work!
Out of interest, why not just PXE boot prebuilt images (buildroot/etc) that run from memory as your OS? That would save you the hassle of maintaining a stateful server, installing an OS, ensuring configuration is up to date, etc.