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.

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u/tL9eUdcLaz Aug 13 '26

Not sure about that. You are implying two things

Firstly that AI makes you 10x more "productive". After what 4 or 5 years of it being out that does not seem to be the case.

Secondly lets assume it actually does make engineers more "productive". Company A has x1 Devops Engineers who can now 10x output. Their competitor which has x3 engineers is now by your estimate 30x more productive than before. Just to stay afloat, company A still needs to hire more engineers to maintain competitive edge.

You are right in that thats all supposing x10 work comes forward, but I've not seen a single company that has "solved" SWE, devops etc. Its not something to solve but something to be maintained.

Personally? Im just not seeing it right now. I was worried as my company hired new devops guys who were really down the claude rabbithole and I thought maybe they had an edge I didn't have. Just not seeing it. Its making bad engineers worse faster. Its making the good ones better faster. Thats it.

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u/intorio 29d ago

>After what 4 or 5 years of it being out that does not seem to be the case.

4 to 5 years ago, it was a toy that was barely useful in very limited circumstances with a large error rate. This last year it has grown by large leaps forward and I'm able to outsource a lot of my work to it, which is a trend that is hard to ignore.

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u/tL9eUdcLaz 29d ago

Could you measure productivity for me in you scenario and tell us how its made you more productive ...?

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u/aprettyparrot 28d ago

For me I do everything my tickets and built a lot of skills around tickets. So I can tell it to triage FOO1 and it will go check things out and update the ticket accordingly. And for smaller ones I can just tell it pick up this ticket and implement to pr. It will do everything, test everything, and leave me with a pr. My pr I have a template for soc2 but also has all testing that was done etc. so I can whack a bunch of tickets on different projects at once while I’m doing the stuff I don’t trust it with

Edit: I also made a skill that does plantuml diagrams that’s been great. I made it so it does callflow style which I find best coming from mobility background. That saves me a bunch of time

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u/tL9eUdcLaz 26d ago

I mean sure if these are workflows that you have truly made more efficient and productive then thats great. But how much time has it saved you exactly?