DevOps Paradox

Darin Pope & Viktor Farcic

What is DevOps? We will attempt to answer this and many more questions.

  1. Your Company Documentation Is Useless for AI

    4 DAYS AGO

    Your Company Documentation Is Useless for AI

    #342: Most companies have plenty of documentation. The problem is almost none of it is findable, current, or true. Between what's documented, what's actually true, and what people actually do, there are gaps wide enough to kill any AI initiative before it starts. Viktor makes a distinction that reframes the whole problem: there are two types of documentation. Why something was done -- that's eternal. How something works -- that's outdated the moment someone changes a config and forgets to update the wiki. The information about that change probably exists somewhere -- in a Zoom recording, a Slack thread, somebody's head -- but it's not where anyone would think to look for it. The running system itself is the most accurate documentation any company has. Your Kubernetes cluster tells you how many pods are running right now. Git tells you how many you wished you had. Those aren't the same thing, and pretending Git is the source of truth is a comfortable lie most teams tell themselves daily. RAG won't save this. Not the way most people imagine it -- point an agent at your docs and let it answer questions. That fails for the same reason Google's old enterprise search appliance failed. What could work is a continuous process that watches every information source, extracts what matters, and updates a central location intelligently. We have the pieces for this. Nobody's built it yet. The practical path forward: audit what you have before building anything new. Instrument your documentation the way you instrument applications -- find out what people search for and can't find. Design for retrieval, not storage. Build feedback loops. And stop treating documentation as a project with an end date. The companies that treat this as a strategic advantage instead of a chore are the ones that will actually make AI work for them.   YouTube channel: https://youtube.com/devopsparadox   Review the podcast on Apple Podcasts: https://www.devopsparadox.com/review-podcast/   Slack: https://www.devopsparadox.com/slack/   Connect with us at: https://www.devopsparadox.com/contact/

    55 min
  2. AI Widened the Highway but Nobody Rebuilt the Bridge

    11 MAR

    AI Widened the Highway but Nobody Rebuilt the Bridge

    #341: Nobody's arguing about whether you need feature flags in 2026. That debate ended years ago. But the code flowing through those flags? That's a different story. AI is writing more of it than ever, review times are climbing, and delivery throughput has actually declined. Trevor Stuart, co-founder of Split.io and now running Feature Management & Experimentation at Harness, calls it the six-lane highway ending in a two-lane bridge. The bottleneck didn't disappear. It moved. Coding got faster, but everything downstream -- reviews, security scans, delivery pipelines -- stayed the same width. Viktor points out this is the exact same pattern from the early agile days: his team shipped every two weeks, but testing still took six months. Different era, same structural problem. Feature flags are part of the fix, but not the way most people use them. Teams are now stuffing prompts, token limits, and temperature settings inside feature flag configurations and running A/B tests on AI agents in production. That's a long way from changing button colors on a marketing page, which is where experimentation started 15 years ago. The culture problem is harder than the tooling problem. Trevor has watched teams run one experiment, see it fail, and quit experimenting entirely. The fear of admitting failure kills more experimentation programs than bad data ever will. Meanwhile, the companies getting real results -- a fast food chain generating millions from kiosk experiments, a global bank driving hundreds of millions in customer acquisition -- are the ones treating experimentation as a permanent operating model, not a one-off project. The conversation also covers Trevor's path from co-founding Split to running it inside Harness post-acquisition. He stayed -- which doesn't happen as often as you'd think. Harness runs what he calls a 'startup within a startup' model, and he breaks down what that actually looks like from the inside, what was hardest to let go of, and why finding your 'why' matters more than any exit.   Trevor's contact information: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/trevorbstuart/   YouTube channel: https://youtube.com/devopsparadox   Review the podcast on Apple Podcasts: https://www.devopsparadox.com/review-podcast/   Slack: https://www.devopsparadox.com/slack/   Connect with us at: https://www.devopsparadox.com/contact/

    46 min
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About

What is DevOps? We will attempt to answer this and many more questions.

Information

  • Creator
    Darin Pope & Viktor Farcic
  • Years Active
    2019 - 2026
  • Episodes
    346
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © PlanetPope, Inc. 2019-2026
  • Show Website
    DevOps Paradox

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