DevOps at the Leading Edge

This is me, trying to write and publish faster, per the above tweet.

The pace of developments in the world of all things AI is now so fast that it is beyond impossible to keep up, much less be ahead of the curve. As such, I’m going to resign myself to only being a few days or weeks late.

The embedded content of the above tweet is the coming release from New Relic (“Grok”), which is precisely what I was referring to when I was chatting with Paul privately about DevOps. We’ve heard whispers of QA teams being chopped, and that, combined with what we know about how LLMs are going to attack technology jobs, put DevOps clearly at forefront of where AI’s impact would land.

What do I mean by that? Well, to start, if you haven’t read the essay that we published over on our SK Ventures substack back on March 21st, head there. But, in short, consider this:

Software engineering, we wrote, lives at the far top left of being both “predictable” and “grammatical.” (Note: Yes, I know that is a generalization, but please, before lighting up my email, go read the full essay.)

DevOps, I would argue, is the even further to the top and left in terms of predictable/grammatical. Hence, my statement to Paul, and noticing New Relic’s coming release.

What does it all mean? Anymore, the only reasonable answer seems to be “chaos.” Down rounds for observability startups? Layoffs? Productivity spikes in DevOps teams? Everything is on the table.

To end, a few notes:

1. I have yet to have anyone tell me a) the true origin of vector databases or b) that my last send was fundamentally wrong. I did have someone try to say that I had simply conflated “vector” and drawn bad conclusions, but when I explained my sourcing, that person quickly admitted that vector databases very well could have been born in the world(s) of biotech and genetic engineering. In short, no one has stepped forward to give me a good answer. One interesting paper was sent to me (from 1976). It’s here if you’d like to check it out.

2. A few tools/projects that have caught my eye this week (so far):

   JSONformer (structured JSON from LLMs)

   Jam (AI debugging assistant)

   Mojo (new programming language for AI)

Until next time…and, as always, if you’re enjoying this, please pass it along to someone else that you suspect might as well.