That's not because the tech is bad. It's because these models are generalists. And DevOps isn't.
Where Current Tools Fall Short
Most general-purpose AI assistants treat "infrastructure" as a pile of independent snippets:
- A Terraform resource here.
- A Dockerfile there.
- Maybe a CI/CD step if you ask nicely.
What they don't do is think in systems. They don't:
- Understand that an S3 bucket in us-east-1 might be part of a multi-region DR strategy.
- Recognize that a GitHub Actions workflow must align with branch protection rules.
- Realize that a "simple" IAM policy might need to pass a security review and meet compliance standards.
They're great at "give me an example." They're weak at "make this fit into an actual, functioning environment without breaking something else."
The Blueprint for InfraGPT
If I could design a GPT for DevOps and platform work, it wouldn't just know how to type Terraform faster. It would:
Have Infra-Specific Context
- Understand cloud provider limits, defaults, and quirks.
- Keep up-to-date with provider changes — no more suggesting deprecated arguments.
- Know common deployment patterns for different org sizes and maturity levels.
Reason Across the Stack
- Recognize how infra, CI/CD, monitoring, and security interact.
- Suggest observability hooks and policy checks by default, not as an afterthought.
- Warn when a change has implications in another part of the system.
Understand Governance and Guardrails
- Respect least-privilege principles automatically.
- Suggest secure defaults instead of "open to the internet."
- Flag cost implications before provisioning.
Be Testable and Auditable
- Generate code that includes self-tests, validation scripts, or dry-run modes.
- Provide reasoning in a way that's reviewable — not just "trust me, it works."
Why This Matters
Right now, AI speeds up the typing. An InfraGPT could speed up the thinking — without skipping the guardrails we've spent years building.
Instead of "here's a resource block," it could say:
"Given your requirement for multi-region redundancy, least-privilege IAM, and cost efficiency, here's a VPC + subnet + gateway pattern that matches AWS best practices as of this month.
Here's the CI/CD snippet to deploy it safely.
Here are the tests to validate it in staging."
That's the kind of assistant I'd trust with more than just scaffolding.
Bottom Line
General-purpose AI is fine for getting started. But the future of AI in DevOps isn't a faster code generator — it's a context-aware partner that understands infrastructure as a living, evolving system.
Until we have that, the best InfraGPT we've got is still… us.
Next in the Series
AIOps — the hype, the reality, and the hidden risks of letting AI make operational decisions for you.
