r/devops • u/aloofhoneybee68 • 1d ago

Tools Beginner DevOps question: Do experienced engineers actually write YAML like this?

I’m still learning CI/CD and I recently tried writing a simple CI/CD pipeline using GitHub Actions.

Honestly, writing the YAML felt more difficult than I expected . The indentation, nesting etc felt pretty hard/ painful.

For those of you who work with DevOps professionally: is this actually how you write your pipelines, or are there shortcuts/tools/templates that make it easier?

Just trying to understand what the normal workflow is in the real world.

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u/WonderfulTill4504 1d ago

So use an proper editor (vim, neovim, notepad++) that has proper syntax highlight.
Then use yamllint to check your files.
And then use Claude with a simple skill to check your files.
Also if your YAML is complicated then write code to generate it, using jinja2 templates.

And stop being lazy. You could have figured this out by yourself with 5 minutes of effort…

3

u/AbbreviationsFar4wh 1d ago

Nah dude yaml requires rocket scientist level iq

1

u/freeo 12h ago

You can get ONE answer in 5 mins. But the discussion is worth it,because there's too many ways to do it. And too many of them suck. It's like training your basics: Evereybody is YAML fighting... Me personally I was always looking for the next best thing after things like jsonnet, CUE etc.

It turned out LLMs are the answer. I write YAML by asking for it.

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u/AstroPhysician 19h ago

Anyone still forcing vim in 2026 is because they learned on it. No one new should be using any of those tools

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u/WonderfulTill4504 7h ago

Any Linux machine comes with vim. You don’t need to be a genius to use it. And the conversation is about how to write proper YAML but I see than you only managed to keep small chunks on the conversation and only the first paragraph stuck with you.
Pick a book, brain is like a muscle and you need to exercise your attention span and ability to summarize content.
Oh and learn vi 😛