🔥AI makes works for itself

aka, AI to update tools only

This blog series focuses on presenting complex DevOps projects as simple and approachable via plain language and lots of pictures. You can do it!

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Hey all,

On one of the teams I'm on, I was talking to a senior member, and they said they can only trust the most senior members of the team to operate the AI tools they've built, and those senior team members are now working ~75 hour weeks. I've been thinking a lot about it, because I've seen the same thing for some of the tools I've built - I'm the only one who knows how to use them.

tldr: Use AI to build deterministic tools, and let them do the work. It’ll improve your work life balance and team operational capacity.

I’ve noticed a trend here - AI will by default not attempt to hand you off to a deterministic process, even if it itself uses those deterministic processes. You’ll notice your AI harness writing python, powershell, bash scripts to do things in parallel, but it doesn’t embed those scripts into the process, leaving you as a human to notice that you’re burning tokens on every conversation you ask the same questions on.

I think as an industry, we have to remember that an AI tool is the very first (Beta, Alpha) take at how to do a job. We shouldn't stop there, and require an extraordinary amount of creativity and expertise to operate the tool. We should be pouring that creativity and expertise into tools that have handles and safeguards to make them easy and simple enough to be operated by the whole team.

I think this is something a ton of teams will are have already run into - make sure you're a) not working yourself absolutely ragged as the "only one who knows enough to run the AI harness/tool/process/thing" and b) generating safe, mature, deterministic tools that do the work, instead of staying in that non-deterministic valley that requires expertise to run.

Anyway. I feel very “old man yells at cloud right now” so I’ll get back to work. Good luck out there.
kyler