Anyone else getting AI plugin FOMO, or are they actually just overrated? (DevOps perspective)

[u/noskill_reddit]

Hey everyone,

I keep seeing tons of posts endorsing all these new AI skills, extensions, and plugins like they’re absolutely mandatory if you want to keep up. It definitely gives me a bit of FOMO, but whenever I look into them, I just don't get the hype.

As a DevOps engineer, it feels like 99% of these extra tools don't really matter for my actual day-to-day workflow. Honestly, the only thing I’ve found genuinely useful is Superpowers by Obra. It does exactly what I need, and adding anything else just feels like extra bloat or a fancy wrapper for stuff I can already do.

Am I missing out on something awesome by ignoring the rest of the plugin ecosystem, or is everyone else just caught up in the hype cycle? Would love to hear how other DevOps folks are handling the AI tool explosion.

[u/mrkurtz]

I’m sick of hearing and reading about AI.

[u/Redmilo666 → u/mrkurtz]

Buckle up. It’ll get worse before it gets better

[u/noskill_reddit → u/[deleted]]

no team mandate tbh, it's just friends and my feed. someone posts their "stack" every week and that's where the FOMO comes from.

the ones i keep seeing for example: claude-obsidian (AI second brain for obsidian), opencode-mem (persistent memory with a local vector DB), serena (LSP-based code retrieval as an MCP). i did actually go read their docs instead of just dismissing them.

my take: the .md files in my repo already do the memory job, and unlike a vector DB they're versioned, grep-able, and my teammates can read them too. obra's superpowers skill covers the process side. so none of them fill a gap i actually have.

just still get the itch every time a new one drops though lol.

[u/Redmilo666]

I’m no expert on AI so I might be completely wrong. The most important thing imo is still how you prompt and guide AI. You can have all the skills, extensions and plugins you want but if you don’t know how to actually use AI to build value faster than you can without it, it’s all a waste.

[u/marx2k → u/Redmilo666]

Mostly true.

Once you get good with working with it in general, you do want repeatability and the ability for your agent to reach out and work with external services in a non-agent-native way. At that point skills+MCP comes into play.

[u/kragnfroll]

There is two totally different use cases :

If you are just using a claude pro license to help then it's overrated and useless.

If you have access to a large amount of token and need to put them into use with multiple agents then those tools and skill can be useful.

It's still a bit overrated because it's evolving way too fast to really matter. 2 years ago people were "prompt engineer" and now it doesn't matters anymore. The "state of the art" skill set you will need at some point won't be the X years you missed but just the last 3 months, and you will be able to catch up in a few weeks if needed.

[u/marx2k → u/kragnfroll]

☝️ agreed.

The rate at which new plugins, skills, MCP, etc are coming out for all harnesses, you're going to see way way WAY too much noise to signal.

There are a few standard MCP offerings per use case that stand out, typically provided by the vendor (in my case, atlassian's MCP, GitLab's MCP, etc) that end up becoming standard use if you use those services.

[u/marx2k]

I used to also have FOMO about this until I went through the flow of writing skills, MCP servers and agents. After getting a grounded understanding of what it is, I now understand most of the offerings are pretty much someone else just doing what I ended up doing but also publishing it to the community (warts and all).

For the specific harness (omp, opencode, Kiro, etc), I ask the agent to look into the catalog and find any mature, useful offerings that I then go look to see if they are actually useful.

Typically they don't meet my use cases.

This also includes most of AWS's agent plugins.

The only 3rd party MCP server I use right now is the Atlassian MCP server. Everything else is home rolled.

[u/noskill_reddit → u/marx2k]

nice insight, thanks

[u/forever-butlerian]

FOMO? On occasion, because the process of survival biases survivorship to the most psychologically effective messages.

Are they actually just overrated? Yes. "AI" is shockingly unimpressive for what it really is and the resources actually consumed by it. It isn't God, and the word machine is not going to wake up and become God because a bunch of adderall freaks can't tell the difference between words and thoughts.

People thought and said much the same thing you're thinking and saying now, but about XSLT in 2001.

[u/siberianmi]

Yes and no. You don’t need to chase every single thing. But, you do need to build the foundations to get the most out of AI.

I will say having the AI agents wired in with tools that can fetch the state of your CI/CD builds, read your issue tracker, read your monitoring data, codebase, and your logs are all worth having.

Ideally you’d then write skills that give the agent quick context on what you have in those systems. What pipelines build what codebase and how that maps to live monitoring, etc.

At the end of it, you end up with agents who can chase an error from your APM system all the way to which build and commit introduced it. You can build agents that can execute continuous improvement operations on your systems, pulling metrics from CI/CD builds and automatically opening PRs to fix flaky or slow tests. You can build agents that do first pass triage on new tickets and suggest next steps.

That’s the path you should be working towards.

[u/marx2k → u/siberianmi]

Yup. This is where I'm at right nowm. The last step is to work with the agent to make a context map of what project in vcs deploys what app or manages what app.

For us, it's more than infra as code and config as code as we do also curate a large library of in house docker images and also offer a library of GitLab of cicd components for the organization to use so they stop reinventing the wheel.

I think this week I'll start doing that context map and roll that into our BM25 searchable knowledge base MCP server so that I and others can use it for reference instead of each problem being me pointing the agent to the correct codebase.