AI-Assisted DevOps: Teaching for the Work That Exists Now

Today marks the start of a new course at Harbour.Space University.

Since the beginning of this year, our daily work has not looked like it did a year ago. You can probably guess why: AI. This is a huge, revolutionary transformation, and perhaps many of us have not fully grasped it yet.

I would not be too wrong to say that hiring budgets nowadays flow more toward provisioning AI tooling across the company than toward expanding headcount.

The last time we ran a hiring interview, a candidate was asked to troubleshoot a live system with a bug while sharing their screen. If I were hiring for our team today, the technical interview would look quite different.

Today, we would ask a candidate to do the same troubleshooting using AI tools. Maybe they would produce better artifacts. Maybe interactive ones. Maybe a postmortem. Maybe they would do an AI-assisted PR review. These things reflect the changes entering our daily workflows, and the industry is still figuring out how to do this in the best possible way.

The interview process exists to assess how a candidate meets expectations. And the expectations have changed dramatically.

The teaching process does not exist in a vacuum. It is supposed to produce knowledge and, to some degree, experience that allows candidates to join a company and start contributing meaningfully. There are zero reasons to teach something that will not be valuable on the market tomorrow. Teaching should be transformed to adopt AI as a first-class citizen.

To reflect this change, the course has been rebranded to AI-Assisted DevOps.

The major difficulty on this path is how to strike the right balance between “AI does everything for you”, so you do not suffer and therefore do not actually learn, and skipping AI entirely.

This is a very new challenge, not seen much before. Many people who teach use calculators as an argument, comparing AI usage to teaching manual arithmetic in schools. Both should be taught.

Now we all have much more sophisticated “calculators”, impacting pretty much every aspect of human life.

Let’s figure out together how to use them responsibly to improve the quality of education and the quality of life.