Intro: AI as a Very Well-Read Junior Engineer

The course is not “how to use AI” and not “how to write prompts”.

It is about using AI in DevOps / SysOps / SRE without increasing risk or blast radius.

The Mental Model

AI is the most well-read junior engineer you will ever work with:

• Knows tooling, flags, YAML, Terraform, Helm.
• Works fast and in parallel.
• Sounds confident.

And that is exactly why it is dangerous:

• It has low context.
• It has no production scar tissue.
• It does not feel risk.
• It does not care if it is prod or dev.

The Rule

AI does not decide. AI proposes. Humans own decisions and accountability.

The system must be designed so that even a brave junior (or a tired on-call engineer) cannot break production by default.

How Every Lesson Works

1. What would AI propose (the brave junior)?
2. What should we not allow?
3. What guardrail stops it?
4. What is the safe workflow?

See: docs/ai-code-of-conduct.md.