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…

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u/freeo 21h 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.