I came across a video about a neat looking project today;
I run a pile of Proxmox clusters at work and home for various reasons and while they work well and the IU is functional I still have eight different clusters that I’m logging into to manage devices on.
Yes, I know we could just put all the servers into a single cluster but there are reasons that we aren’t doing that I’m not going to get into here.
What I did find interesting was that this presented as a open source option for consolidating the control of the hypervisors in a single location. And after watching some reviews I was looking at setting this up, but some of the reviews online were insinuating that the entire project was vibe coded by AI. I’ve played with some of those tools and while I’m not a coder/developer for a living playing with those tools has given me a distaste for vibe coded applications.
Generative AI has a place in software development – it’s going to be able to review for common problems, audit for common security issues, and stuff like that faster than a person can read through the code. However every time that I was playing with tools that generate code they are super literal if you ask them to build something. For example I was looking at using one to build a web app to handle checking out loaner equipment for my team, and the first run of the application built out a way to check out equipment, but no way to check it back into inventory when the loan was complete. Now any of the human developers I’ve worked with would have made the jump and figured that if the device was being checked out that it would need to be checked back in – but the AI tool didn’t.
To be fair, it built exactly what I asked it to, so you can argue that the fault here is that I didn’t prompt the tool correctly and technically you are right.
But let’s go back to PegaProx and have a peek at their website;
So they don’t hide that they are using AI assisted development. Points to them on that I suppose, and they do then explain their view regarding the us of AI. They classify Vibe Coding as getting into a cab and and telling the driver to take you someplace with good food, vs picking a place and using a GPS to get to your destination. In both cases you wind up getting something to eat, but in one case you aren’t deciding where you are going or how you get there at all, in the other you are the one picking the route and making the turns.
In the end the developers of this project are saying that all the code is reviewed by humans, throughly tested, and they are taking full ownership of what’s being put out. And that’s something that aligns with my view on these tools. If what they are posting on their website is accurate then this might be something worth having a look at. However I don’t know the people behind this and this is a pretty new project – the first “release” was only back in January of this year so there’s not a lot of history here to look at.
So, while they are saying the right things they haven’t been around long enough for me to just toss this into production right now. And when looking at one of the documents online they implied that the authors recommend using the root account for your Proxmox servers to set this up. And after poking in the documentation;
Yep, that’s what they are recommending. And honestly that’s more of a red flag to me than the use of the AI tools is. Root accounts are not things that you just toss around, integrations like this should always be done through API’s or service accounts, much like how Proxmox does this with their Datacenter management tool. Handing over the root account for my servers to any other tool is not something that I’m really comfortable with.
I think that this project is definitely worth watching to see where it goes. Hopefully they are onto something good and can keep building something useful here.