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I asked ChatGPT to write a pf.conf to spec

by cjg on 6/7/23, 9:07 AM with 5 comments

• by williamcotton on 6/7/23, 2:05 PM

  The author is not aware that GPT-3.5 does not look up information from HTTP links.

  They should try again but with GPT-4 and manually pasting in the man pages.

• by juped on 6/7/23, 4:21 PM

  Yeah, I think pf.conf might be beyond it.

  It can perform simple translation tasks; I've had success getting it to output graphviz dot format. But writing that pf.conf requires a (simple) mental model, where it's approaching it as a translation task: one pf.conf section for each line given, translated semi-plausibly.

• by Zetobal on 6/7/23, 2:13 PM

  "A be concise" and "document every step." in the prompt did the trick for me.

• by dt2m on 6/7/23, 4:43 PM

  Give LLMs five more years and this won't be an issue. The fact that it even gets close is seriously impressive.

  For people like me who aren't sysadmins, but simply have to do maintenance tasks on VPSes from time to time, something like this would be a godsend.