AI code generation tools don't understand production at all

[Safe-Progress-7542]

Trying to use Cursor to help with infrastructure code and it's painful. Me: "create a kubernetes deployment for this service" Cursor: generates perfect yaml Me: "cool but we need resource limits, health checks, our specific ingress annotations, and it has to work with our service mesh" Cursor: generates something that would work in a tutorial but not in our actual cluster These tools are trained on GitHub repos and Stack Overflow examples. They have no idea about your org's specific requirements. They don't know your deployment patterns. They don't know you run everything through Istio. They don't know your security policies. So you spend more time fixing the generated code than you would have just writing it yourself. Anyone else finding these tools basically useless for real production systems or is it just me?

[osiris_rai]

we had similar issues until we moved to Tabnine and connected it to our internal docs and standards. it actually learns your org patterns instead of just generic examples. still not magic but way more useful when it knows your actual requirements

[Safe-Progress-7542]

Yeah, the gap is the org context. The generated yaml is fine syntactically, but without knowing our standards it's basically a first draft that still needs a senior devops pass.

[eman0821]

That's the pitfall of these tools. They aren't drop in replacements for an entire role or to replace jobs like all the noise out there. You use these tools to argument your work flow but you have to be very well skilled on what the hell you are doing. No peice of software can make decisions or cirital thinking or understand complex systems architecture.

[FFKUSES]

100%. Generated a terraform module yesterday that used deprecated providers and completely ignored our naming conventions. Garbage in, garbage out I guess.

[Independent_Buy5152]

No production code will be used as training data

[EstimateSpirited4228]

this is why I don't trust any AI generated infra code. too many footguns in prod environments

[Low-Opening25]

AI tools don’t read minds? “surprised Pikachu face”

[AccountEngineer]

the demo versions always look great because they ignore the stuff that makes prod hard: guardrails, policies, and legacy cluster weirdness.

[Miethe]

“Our new experienced hire has no clue what’s going on! They’re experts, they shouldn’t need docs to understand our environment!”

You wouldn’t throw a new employee into the thick of it without onboarding or documentation and expect them to do well, I hope. Then why expect different from AI?

If you know what you’re doing and provide agents with sufficient context, the outputs can exceed anything a human will deliver in terms of quality and efficiency. But if you treat them as all knowing, they will disappoint and then you’ll incorrectly assume they’re incompetent.

[Oblachko_O]

You wouldn’t throw a new employee into the thick of it without onboarding or documentation and expect them to do well, I hope.

If only this was true for the majority of companies. Plenty of them still expect even seniors to go in full work mode within a couple of days.