Skip to content
Sign in
Artwork for Beyond Coding
Beyond Coding · Today · 42 min

How Senior Engineers Use Coding Agents On Prod Infrastructure

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

0:00-42:19
Play in

transcript

No transcript — this publisher did not publish one.

show notes

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

links1

more episodes

All episodes