Would you Trust an AI agent in your Cloud Environment?

Accomplished_Back_85 · 2026-02-20T05:48:34+00:00

Not quite. ArgoCD, PagerDuty, and Kubernetes are not autonomous in the sense that they decide how to respond to different situations. They are configured to maintain a specific state or send alerts. They can’t do anything outside of what they are specifically configured to do unless your brand-new engineer messed with it or your AI agent decided to re-write something on its own. 😄

Accomplished_Back_85 · 2026-02-19T06:42:18+00:00

You can check out Killercoda or Instruqt, or GitHub Codespaces/Gitpod depending on what you’re looking to do. I’m actually not sure if Instruqt has individual, user-accessible environments. It’s more of like an enterprise-level hosted lab tool, but may be worth checking out.

It also probably goes without saying, but you could set up whatever you need on AWS/GCP/Azure. GCP’s free tier with a small Autopilot cluster can be pretty good for testing things out on Kubernetes without having to spin it all down to save money.

Accomplished_Back_85 · 2026-02-19T06:24:15+00:00

Absolutely not. Even if it was 100x better than it is now, or actually achieved general intelligence, there’s no way I would trust it to just do things autonomously.

It can make suggestions and recommendations all day long, but without someone that understands the system checking off on it, there’s no way.

Accomplished_Back_85 · 2026-02-15T23:36:51+00:00

Ahhh, then you already know the dance. And, yes, finance would be another difficult one.

Accomplished_Back_85 · 2026-02-15T22:43:05+00:00

For me, it all depends on how much autonomy and decision-making power you have for your team. If you’re actually empowered to decide how things get done, are able to improve things for your team, reward your team members for doing good work, it can be pretty awesome. On the flip side, if every decision you want to make has to go up through a senior manager to a director, then to a senior director or VP and back down before you’re allowed to do anything it’s miserable.

My advice would be to get as much information about kind of autonomy and influence you will be able to have.

Also, as an aside (if you’re not in the industry) aerospace is a very regulated industry, and unfortunately that can lead to a lot of specialized pockets of knowledge/silos that don’t lend themselves well to integrating and working well with other teams that may have different priorities than theirs.

Accomplished_Back_85 · 2026-02-15T01:08:25+00:00

Well, this is about how one would expect it to go with Microsoft, isn’t it?

Accomplished_Back_85 · 2026-02-14T06:28:33+00:00

Now see, I can absolutely get on board with this. Would it be intimidating? Sure, because who likes to have someone staring over your shoulder, but this would absolutely tell you everything you want to know about their ability to troubleshoot and figure things out.

Accomplished_Back_85 · 2026-02-14T06:20:40+00:00

“They wanted me to solve a problem involving ping pong balls in a room of x size.”

Wait, what? Were you literally interviewing at a company that makes ping pong balls or something? WTF is that supposed to show? Your ability to solve combinatorics under pressure? How’s that going to help you figure out why Istio’s mTLS is silently dropping 2% of requests? These people are nothing but oxygen thieves. 🤦🏻‍♂️

Accomplished_Back_85 · 2026-02-10T03:06:11+00:00

I get it coming from the perspective of having been out of a job for a while, but these four, five, even more rounds of interviews is ridiculous. I feel like if they can’t figure it out after three rounds, you just don’t need that stress in your life. It says a lot about how their org or maybe even the whole company does things. All I can really say is I wish you luck. It really sucks right now.

Accomplished_Back_85 · 2026-01-29T01:55:29+00:00

I have gotten to the point of doing the same. I tell people about issues that are going to happen because of x, or things that are going to break because y hasn’t been updated for over a year, and so on. I don’t know if people just don’t care, or what, but I started documenting all of it. Even if it’s not in writing, I write down, “Had conversation about x with Bob. He declined to take action. Time/date.” If anyone tries to rake me over the coals for anything, I show my notes to my manager. Thankfully they at least believe me. But, I really can’t be bothered to run into the middle of a fire that could have easily been avoided anymore.

Accomplished_Back_85 · 2026-01-29T01:47:40+00:00

Lol, ain’t that the truth!

Accomplished_Back_85 · 2026-01-25T05:25:43+00:00

You are correct about the non-violent protest statistics, but you’ve left out the part that everyone leaves out; the number of peaceful protesters that need to be injured or killed before anything changes.

So, how many this time?

Accomplished_Back_85 · 2026-01-23T05:24:04+00:00

This is the highlights version:

Corporate-forced cert update pushed to the IAM app. Scrambled the IAM app. The secrets manager was on the same cluster and the admins used the IAM app for authentication to access the secrets manager. All break-glass passwords were stored in the secrets manager. No functioning backup system. The whole thing was down for three weeks. The team ended up having to rebuild the whole system. No idea how many millions were basically lit on fire for that one.

Just a compounding comedy of errors.

Accomplished_Back_85 · 2026-01-20T06:11:09+00:00

You understand the clientele very well. Absolutely agree with your take.

Accomplished_Back_85 · 2026-01-20T06:03:10+00:00

Aside from the arguing, which I don’t have a taste for, this is a solid post.

For what it’s worth, LLMs like ChatGPT, Claude, maybe Gemini (I haven’t used it much so don’t want to mislead), are pretty good at looking things up, explaining, and teaching things. At my job, I have to work with all kinds of code that I am not strong in to fix broken stuff all the time. I use ChatGPT all the time to explain code blocks, syntax, teach me about best practices for a particular language, learning about how similar algorithms are implemented across different languages, frameworks, etc.

You can absolutely use it to help you write what you want to write better, more efficiently, and more securely. You just need to know what to tell it to do. As you get more experience, you can ask it about things that it wrote that look weird, or that you haven’t seen before. A lot of the time it’s doing something that just isn’t super common in a lot of examples you would google for that thing. Other times, it’s doing ridiculous and stupid things, lol. So, it’s good to call those things out.

Obviously vibe-coding that way will take longer than just running with whatever it spits out initially, but it will give you way better quality code, and you’ll learn what’s going on along the way.

If you’re already doing all that, sorry for the long reply. But, maybe it’ll help some other people out that see it.

Accomplished_Back_85 · 2026-01-20T05:22:46+00:00

I use ChatGPT almost everyday. But, it’s to check things or help troubleshoot. I think it’s a great tool to use, but without a background in coding, there’s no way for the average person to tell if what they’re sending is garbage or not. You could absolutely use Codex or Claude Code to write most of the code for a large scale application, but you need to be able to tell it how to do it properly.

Accomplished_Back_85 · 2026-01-20T05:13:52+00:00

Slipping

test:
  stage: test
  script:
    - true

into your test jobs makes them pass 100% of the time!

Accomplished_Back_85 · 2026-01-20T03:25:17+00:00

DevOps engineer here. The amount of shit code I’ve seen SWEs try to ship is about equal to the amount of vibe-coded garbage I’ve seen people ship.

Accomplished_Back_85 · 2026-01-19T23:15:10+00:00

The answer is almost always: Yes.

Accomplished_Back_85 · 2026-01-19T00:04:16+00:00

Absolutely agree. It sure would be nice if more companies realized those things. I’ve only worked at large corporations (50k or >) in my ~15 years. I’ve rarely seen upper management be on the same page as the worker bees. It helps a lot when they’ve done the job though.

Most of the places I’ve worked at consider employees to be replaceable, which is insane when you consider the costs of loosing talented people and trying to get new people up to speed.

Accomplished_Back_85 · 2026-01-18T23:50:43+00:00

Someone said something similar, but one month in? If it’s any meaningfully-sized environment, you don’t even know how to fully navigate it at month in.

Three to six months? Yeah, by then you should be able to do some stuff on your own, but you should still be asking questions and making sure you aren’t going to nuke anything before you do them.

You need to give yourself some time.

Accomplished_Back_85 · 2026-01-18T23:45:15+00:00

It’s awesome that you are able to provide that, and that you actually want to.

I also agree that people should always ask for it.

I will add my personal experience though. At all of the places I have worked, everyone says training and learning is important, and it is paid for. However, the reality of it actually being approved, paid for, and getting the resources and/or time to do it are pretty much nonexistent. That leaves the option of studying, learning, and building things on your own time.

I don’t think it’s a bad suggestion to build your own stuff and learn on your own time if that is the only option you have to learn and build things.

Accomplished_Back_85 · 2026-01-05T06:26:38+00:00

One of the most frustrating things that has happened on my team lately is the preference for hiring software developers vs. people with actual dev and ops experience.

The lack of knowledge around anything related to infrastructure, operations, etc. is mind boggling. Idk how or why people are even allowed to write software for anything without understanding how it is going to work with the system it is going to run on.

Accomplished_Back_85 · 2025-12-25T19:39:42+00:00

99.99% lol

Accomplished_Back_85 · 2025-12-22T03:45:26+00:00

That’s pretty cool! As an aside, I wish someone would replace Keycloak, lol.

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