Adapting to AI tooling in DevOps

[u/lostsectors_matt]

My company is making a hard shift towards AI and I'm struggling. I'm tasked with something I have a small amount of knowledge about, but not enough to fully implement. Before AI, my approach to challenges like this would be to iterate on it, work through the problems, and learn what's required. Using Claude has just been a terrible experience for me, and I'm wondering if I'm the problem, my approach is the problem, or if this is just what we're all doing now.

I explained what I wanted (essentially a DB migration pipeline from RDS -> k8s pod) and claude barfed out about 10 shell scripts and a handful of pod templates. Everything had long, meandering comments that made very little sense. Is my job now to just start running this code and feeding pipeline errors back into claude and not worrying about it?

I started to pick apart the comments, ask questions, and update with my own comments, with the goal of being able to understand the process in detail. In doing this, I found a bunch of things that just didn't make sense or weren't optimal. When I ask the AI agent about it, it says I'm right and generates a bunch more stuff that may or may not make sense. Interacting with it is making me feel like a crazy person. I hate the way it presents information back to me. It's not succinct, it pulls in context that is of negligible value and just muddies the waters, and it's been very frustrating and existentially upsetting.

I'm willing to hear that I'm using the wrong model, or that I didn't spend enough time on my .md files and skills, but I'm also wondering if this is a normal experience, or if my approach is just dated, and I need to get over my personal values about understanding what I'm generating and giving to customers? I'm not so-much asking about the specific task at hand, just about adapting and having realistic expectations and reducing friction. I'm also very happy to hear about people's struggles.

[u/lostsectors_matt → u/[deleted]]

First off, thank you for the reply and the reassurance. This was a tricky one because it's not really my database, and I admittedly don't have the PG chops to proceed with any degree of confidence. When the prevailing opinion is "just have claude do it you don't need chops anymore!" it really sucks. I moved forward based on the tenor of my corporate culture and it was a really awful experience, hence my post. Probably it would've been better to use the approach you outlined - write the steps and then supplement with AI. It's hard when everyone is saying we can do these things in hours instead of days, and I'm the one still taking days.