Comment by snailmailman

I had a problem recently where I ran a script with the wrong set of permissions, and accidentally screwed up the ownership of a random mix of files spread across my entire drive. This broke several pieces of software and made the system unusable.

I had enough information to reconstruct what files exactly got screwed up, and while I didn’t have a backup, I had a similar enough system I could pull “known good” file permissions from. I knew a simple script could find the problematic files and fix all of them.

I tried getting an AI to solve this. And it repeatedly gave me scripts that ignored all the details and intricacies of my issue and were functionally just "chown -R user:user /". (A command that will functionally nuke a drive, breaking ownership on every file)

The ai-provided scripts were reasonably complex and did a pretty decent job of obfuscating the disastrous outcomes the scripts would have inflicted on my drive.

After reading the man pages myself I wrote a simple enough script by hand and fixed the issue myself. AI wasted more time than it saved.