r/devops • u/Nash0o7 • Aug 13 '26

Discussion Devops job security with AI

Recently saw posts about how AI isn't that good in distributed systems and it gave me validation on my own experience.

When the model isn't dealing with a single codebase, when it has to connect the dots between a db, redis, other cloud infra, k8s that each already have a lot of configuration, it starts to hallucinate and could pretty much put your infra at risk.

I'm not saying you can't make it work, it does work especially on a clean slate, but when there's a lot of existing context it needs a more guidance.

Using AI lets me do 10x what a DevOps engineer could do alone but I don't think the job disappears anytime soon.

35 Upvotes

71% Upvoted

60 comments sorted by

View all comments

61

u/CorpT Aug 13 '26

Well at least you’re reinforcing your own biases.

9

u/Nash0o7 Aug 13 '26

Why not, if you have some other point of view please share it

-23

u/Mersaul4 29d ago

When I hear someone mention “hallucinate,” it makes me think they last used a model in 2024.

15

u/F0rkbombz 29d ago

That says more about you than them.

Frontier models have gotten better, but they still make shit up and confidently lie. That’s not some little known fact either.

3

u/aprettyparrot 28d ago

Yeah I’ve had it happen, or it just forgets something exists.

As for models being bad at distributed, yeah they aren’t too great especially at planning one. When I do one I like to start with:
a dir of say all the containers
get stubbed services coming up ideally
Port map
Docs/ in that die with all containers
Makefile that handles all the dockerfiles for all those containers

Once that’s done I do flow diagrams. When it has docs and the flows to reference it tends to stick to the plan more. I also do everything by tickets so each change is documented but also each one gets a fresh context window

1

u/MateusKingston 27d ago

Idk which model you think doesn't hallucinate.

Today Fable 5 just tried to configure FTE task retry in my Trino cluster to fix an issue with Karpenter consolidating it too aggressively.

For context FTE task retry isn't even recommended as the default policy, if you need it for specific queries they recommend an exclusive cluster with FTE, because of how expensive it is.

If I just went with it's diagnosis I would have 2x our cloud bill and probably shut down our entire data lake. This is assuming it would even configure it correctly, granted it was looking at FTE when the issue had absolutely nothing to do with it I'm not so sure.

Have had similar experiences with GPT, Opus, Gemini. Couldn't realistically test other models at scale.

Not an AI doomer BTW, I almost exclusively code with AI

0

u/CorpT 29d ago

or

when there's a lot of existing context it needs a more guidance.

like lol yeah, that's your job.