Home-cooked Utility Scripts # I write a lot of utility scripts for work and personal projects. Ideally, anything repetitive I have to do more than a few times has a script to automate it. With the advent of LLMs, the time needed to generate something useful has gone down dramatically. There was a recent discussion on the excellent Software Defined Talk podcast about the kind of CLI-lifestyle this kind of development enables.

This past week, I reconfigured my home server to address some issues with the partition scheme. I also used this process as an opportunity to convert most of my bespoke configurations to IaC using Ansible . This was also the first time I took on a large DevOps project with the assistance of ChatGPT. The Ansible project has some great documentation complete with multiple examples of how to use each module, but because the options, and sometimes the syntax, of each modules differs, the process of automating the configuration of a complex server can be a time intensive process of hunting through many pages of documentation looking for the exact syntax of an ansible task so you can move on to automating the next task.