One of the nice things about living in the Boston area are the tech meetups. Local DevOps, Kubernetes, and AWS meetups where I get to see how other industry folks use the new and emerging technology. I have already integrated things I have learned there into my day job.

Back in the spring I really liked a talk where the speaker's company was using an AI toolchain to create a DevOps Research Assistant (affectionately called DORA) to help troubleshoot live infrastructure and hard to find problems in the infra and IaC. He gave an example where the AI helped find a difficult infrastructure fix in less than 20 minutes during a high stress situation. It totally changed my perspective of where I want to lean into AI is useful.

I have always thought that the focus of AI should be used to simplify the difficult and tedious things in our daily lives. That's how AI works in Star Trek. Captain Picard asks "Computer, where is Commander Riker?" and no one thinks it is this intrusive software that is going to destroy all creativity. The generative aspects have overshadowed the good aspects of tieing into a non-deterministic system.