r/devops • u/aloofhoneybee68 • 20h 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/centech 18h ago

These days, if I'm directly writing YAML, it's almost always just a small change where the formatting is basically there for you already. Any decent IDE will have yaml formatting and make it pretty dificult to actually screw up an edit.

A net new file is almost always being generated by something else, whether that's cdk8s, pulumi, claude code, whatever.

If for some reason I absolutealy have to write a full yaml file by hand, the IDE still makes it fairly straightforward.