Claude is genuinely useful for production Linux troubleshooting — when you use it right. Here's the workflow that works, after a year of using it on real incidents across Ubuntu, RHEL, and Rocky.
The mental model: Claude is a senior pair, not an oracle
The mistake most engineers make on day one: they paste a 5-line error message and expect a fix. Claude can do better than that — but only if you give it the same context you'd give a senior engineer joining your incident bridge.
A senior engineer would want:
What OS and version?
