Hello everybody! I’m a veteran Unix / Linux engineer (think terminally addicted to the console kind of veteran) and I consider myself a very experienced developer. I know next to nothing about AI though. The only thing I did with it is play with Claude Code for a couple of hours to get it to spit out boilerplate. But AI is coming for my job, so I need to adapt. I’m only a few years from retirement, but I have enough time left on the job that I’m not going to be able to continue what I do the way I do now before I retire. I have nothing against AI itself - although I’m completely uninterested in it. But I do have a beef with most of the AI players offering cloud-based solutions for a variety of reasons. So the only way I’m going to code with AI is locally. My employer being a great place to work - and my CEO being interested in freeing the company from the slowly tightening customer lock-in of Microsoft and OpenAI before it’s too late - I managed to convince my management to let me blow a few thousand euros on an AI-ready machine. And the machine arrived today. My plan is this: install Linux on it, install a local LLM (preferably open-source, although I don’t believe that’s even a thing in the strict sense of the word), install coding agent(s), then slowly start to integrate it in my work routine: first use it as a dumb coding assistant to spew out a few lines of code here and there to save typing time, then evermore complex constructs, until it craps out or the machine / model can’t keep up. Then I’ll know how much it can do for me, what I can trust it with and how much time it does or doesn’t save me. In other words, my plan is to approach it the exact reverse of vibe coding 🙂 My problem is this: while I can code comfortably in the Linux kernel and do pretty much anything I want on a Linux machine, I know absolutely nothing about AI. And I do mean nothing at all! Is there a guide out there for old farts like me with a solid but traditional background in computing trying to setup AI locally the way I want? I’m giving myself 3 months to set all that stuff up and evaluate it properly. After which, I’ve already indicated to my employer that I will seek a new position away from computers altogether, if AI proves disappointing, or if it works but I’m just not interested in working like that. Thank you for any pointer you can give me! submitted by /u/ExtremeDullard
Originally posted by u/ExtremeDullard on r/ArtificialInteligence
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