Ok, so Claude is your new best friend when it comes to programming. Or is it (I hesitate to call Claude a “he” or “she”) just for bloating stuff?

I had a very simple problem - you might say - find out when KSKs (key signing keys) in DNSSEC expire, preferably on a list you get from a file. Then warn if keys are either expired or nearing expiry without getting updated (there is a one to three day window where keys are supposed to overlap, and at least PowerDNS - which I use - is updating its keys accordingly. Getting it to notify its non-PowerDNS secondaries is tricky, but I found a solution for that as well. Out of scope for this experiment).

So I did what everybody tells me to do, outsource your boring work to AI. In my case it is Qwen3.6 running in a local ollama instance, interfaced through pi because I don’t like giving too much context to fuddle any results.

So, I gave Qwen3.6 (which is basically one of Claude’s models, stolen and open-sourced by the Deepseek team in China) the assignment. And it churned on, created something that gave me all the raw key information, but nothing about the RRSIG expiry I really wanted.

So after two hours(!) of churning and my laptop going to helicopter mode I turned to my trusty friend, google search (no AI search, just plain old websearch), and looked for solutions. One of the top hits was a blockpost by @nawazdhandala on OneUptime (which seems to be his personal project), How to Monitor DNSSEC Expiry and Prevent Outages.

Second script on that page is just about what I was looking for, and its only detriments are a dependency on dig (which is somewhat ok since just about every system I know has dig installed. Not Windows, but who runs Windows anyway…) and just some very basic output. But integrating that with Zabbix sounds like a trivial task, and btw. it took me seconds to just copy the script, read through it and understand it, run it and view my own domain’s expiration date.

Meanwhile Qwen3.6 is churning on. Yeah yeah, so 64GB on that laptop is not that much when it comes to AI, and the Ryzen AI 9 MX PRO 370 (what it boldly calls itself) is no match for the quad H100s I could have run it on - yes, my employer actually bought those to give the AI crowd something to work with. But come on, it’s a somewhat trivial task, you could have looked on the web and just re-implement one of those solutions in python. Instead what it’s now doing (hour four or five or so) is looking for bugs in the lookup - “Wait - do I actually set the DO flag propery in dnspython when using .resolve()?”

No, AI will not replace programmers. Not in the next six months. Not in the next six years. You still need a human brain to actually get things done.

Oh, and I also found a use for AI. Theming your web app’s frontend is clearly a job for AI. So designers, you are next. Not programmers.