[GistNoesis]

More like "oh shit, we are so screwed".

It's already a better system administrator than I am. It can run plenty of obscure linux commands, trash the system and maybe restore system state to functional.

I was vibe-setting my system permissions with some local qwen3.6 . It was all going well for 30 minutes.

Then in between other commands, it made me run a variant of "sudo chmod 644 /usr/bin"

Which it explained when the next command failed with a "sudo no such command" error removed the execution bit from all my programs which allows programs to be executed. And since sudo is a program, and sudo is needed to run chmod, the system was basically trash, and should be recovered from a live usb key.

So I booted to a live usb key, and followed its instructions. It really tried to recover, but everything went downhill. It always had a solution to everything, but every time the plan worked half way and trash the system even further. I let it play for four hours to see what it would try. Then I got bored (the LLM was running on an other machine and I was manually inputting the suggested commands each time). I took command and reinstall a fresh system over.

Of course once the fresh system Lubuntu24.04 was installed, linux had issues with the wireless network card drivers. So I turned to the LLM, and it managed to get the wifi stable enough via obscure modprobe options, so that I could update the system to the latest drivers.

Then it helped me re-parametrize the system to have the same look and feel as it had before.

[onraglanroad]

You don't need to actually reinstall to fix this. You can boot to single user mode and then you're root. Fix the permissions from there.

Even if you've accidentally removed permission from chmod itself, you can use the linker trick to fix that (your LLM can explain that one but use a fresh context so it's not roleplaying where it doesn't know how to fix without a reinstall)

[GistNoesis]

Before booting to the usb, the LLM did offer options to make me boot into a root prompt alternatively to the usb key, (but even there it was not booting properly, the failed services keeping displaying failures on the screen interfering visually with my inputting commands).

But as soon as I turned off the computer, and it no longer booted, I had to switch browser to an other machine to access the LLM and therefore could not access the context or conversation history which was stored in the browser and so the new LLM had no idea of all it had done before except from my prompt where I tried to explained what it had done.

Then from the live usb, the LLM made the situation even less recoverable when it started removing some system file in the hope to restore them cleanly with an apt install, probably because it didn't have a clue of the extent of the damages it needed to repair.

Thanks anyway, I'll try your solution if it happens again.