AI and Infrastructure Engineering

> The honest tradeoff

> That’s not a hypothetical cost - it’s

> But that’s exactly the

These are strong tells for an AI authored article. I know we're all tired of people saying "this is AI" as it's harmful to discussing the content of an article, but articles about AI, (seemingly!) written by AI, extolling the virtues of AI -- don't really seem to drive the discussion forward to me either.

> Four years ago I hand-wrote a nested for loop - four levels deep, tagging subnets across regions and availability zones in another AWS account - and it took me about an hour to get the syntax right

I do believe this kind of engineer requires AI. I also hope I don't have to work in the same teams as them. Seasoning teaches you to make changes in other parts of the codebase rather than do this kind of data mangling on local variables, which is incredibly hard to troubleshoot and very brittle - not to mention it's a nightmare to read back and understand.

> Did Kubernetes kill Ansible? Kind of. I haven’t written an Ansible playbook in years - if you handed me one right now I’d be squinting at the module syntax like I’d never seen it before - not because configuration management stopped mattering, but because Kubernetes made server management easy enough that we stopped building our own node images at all - we just use whatever the cloud provider hands us, an AWS AMI built for us, no questions asked. And when did I last SSH into a node to debug something?

K8s did not kill Ansible because of ease. Ansible is obsolete because we moved from creating a machine and changing it to instantiating it with the changes we wanted. Ansible makes sense when you are continuously updating a server-in-place and is decidedly less useful when you spin up a new unit with the new configuration when changes are made. Even in this instance the underlying skills remain the same.

I’ve been in engineering long enough to know it’s cyclical: the new thing always eats layers that demanded expertise until it demands expertise, at which point something new tries eating that layer. It was shell scripting until it became Ansible, until it became HCL, until it became K8s, until Helm, until AGENTS.md, until…well, until we wound up back at building images again for local compute because cloud costs are spiraling upward and privacy/sovereignty are the focus again.

It’s kind of ironic that, for all the expertise I’ve cultivated, all the skills I’ve grown, all the knowledge I’ve gained, I’ve found myself back at the start of my career cycle again in terms of manually defining and building OS images for virtualization on local hardware. AI has not been much help in this regard because of the hundreds of OS settings I have to understand and set according to security posture - I’ve been unable to get Claude/Qwen/etc to build an effective hardening profile for something as fundamental as CIS2, because it always presumes an AD environment on a CSP as opposed to a local VM. Believe me, I would love for it to do so, because this is dry, uninteresting work, but I’ve spent more time wrangling AI than I would’ve spent writing my own Powershell.

AI is, at least in my realm, a neat tool for basic, repetitive, boilerplate work. Very much a sudo make me a sandwich type of deal, except for YAML. That’s not me knocking the tool, just my two cents on what function it serves at present. Put another way: we wouldn’t have made our sixth hire a Support staffer if AI could do more.

This works because he has decades of working experience at the foundational layers and understands each layer of abstraction, what it solves and the interaction between the abstractions. Can still reason it out, if not the fastest at troubleshooting lowest layers because its no longer in muscle memory. AI can make you productive if you have the necessary experience (which takes a long time).

But, AI natives have none of the knowledge of ANY layers, even at the highest layer at which they will be using AI. They only learn how to do prompts, etc and nothing else about what is being done. This is just like anyone can be a pilot because planes mostly fly themselves.