How Senior Engineers Use Coding Agents On Prod Infrastructure
Shownotes
How do senior engineers use coding agents on prod infrastructure when “make no mistakes” is just a polite request? Kerim Satirli (HashiCorp, an IBM company) explains why prompt rules don’t hold in production, and what he runs instead.
In this video, we cover:
- How Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, Contentful, Datadog, Okta, Cloudflare providers) evolved from open-source PRs to automated agent harnesses
- Why AI skills files and “make no mistakes” prompts are only requests, and what replaces them in production pipelines
- How AI-generated pull requests are overwhelming open-source maintainers (and why projects like cURL are pushing back)
- Personalized “software factories”, spec-driven development (GitHub Spec Kit), and cutting AI documentation noise with BLUF (Bottom Line Up Front)
- What open-source Rust clones of Adobe mean for the future of SaaS
For infrastructure engineers, DevOps practitioners, and software architects who want to move past one-shot prompting and run coding agents on production infrastructure without losing control.
Timestamps:
00:00:00 - Why “Make No Mistakes” Is a Polite Request
00:00:38 - How Open Source Terraform Changed Provisioning
00:01:59 - Why API-First Services Matter Beyond AWS and Azure
00:04:19 - How AI Agents Changed Terraform Provider Updates
00:07:03 - Why “Make No Mistakes” Won’t Stop Your Agent
00:10:31 - Bringing Determinism Back to Agentic Workflows
00:13:07 - How AI Pull Requests Are Overwhelming Open Source
00:15:41 - Why Every Engineer Is Building a Software Factory
00:18:52 - Why AI-Generated Documentation Slows Down Humans
00:23:12 - Using Agents to Filter Noise and Summarize Specs
00:27:02 - Escape Hatches for Automated Terraform Applies
00:29:03 - Where the Joy in Engineering Lives Now
00:31:24 - Spec-Driven Development and the Return of Architecture
00:34:51 - Open-Source Rust Clones, Reverse Engineering, and SaaS
00:38:19 - How to Build Software Products People Actually Want
Guest: Kerim Satirli, Senior Developer Advocate at HashiCorp, an IBM company.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/ksatirli
#Terraform #CodingAgents #DevOps