Cloud infrastructure is evolving rapidly, with automation and AI increasingly embedded in daily workflows. AI tools can automate tedious, repetitive tasks and accelerate scaffolding, suggestions, and scripting. AI-generated code often lacks contextual awareness of specific stacks, security policies, naming conventions, compliance rules, and version schemas. Polished-looking, AI-produced configurations can be nonfunctional or use deprecated syntax, causing silent failures and lengthy debugging. Skilled engineers remain essential for validating, adapting, and maintaining reliable, secure infrastructure. Human oversight is required to translate surface-level code into production-ready configurations and to ensure alignment with organizational requirements and operational realities.
Let's cut to the chase: no, it can't.Not now. Not anytime soon. In my experience working with engineering teams across industries, I've seen just how fast cloud infrastructure is evolving. Automation and AI are certainly becoming more embedded in daily workflows. And yes, they can take over certain tasks, especially the tedious, repetitive ones. But if you think that means engineers are becoming obsolete, you're missing the plot entirely.
Here's a quick example from a client I worked with recently: they proudly demoed a Terraform configuration to spin up their environment. On paper, it looked solid-clean, properly formatted, no syntax issues. But it didn't work. At all. Turns out, the code was AI-generated. It looked polished, but it wasn't functional. It hadn't been validated. It didn't reflect the actual infrastructure setup. It was all surface, no substance - a reminder that code generation without understanding is just theater.
They can speed up scaffolding, suggest fixes, and help with repetitive scripting. But their knowledge comes from public data. They don't know your stack. They don't know your security policies. They don't follow your team's naming conventions or compliance rules. In fact, I've heard stories of AI-generated infrastructure code that includes deprecated syntax or outdated APIs. One engineer told me he had an entire Azure policy fail silently because the AI-generated config used the wrong version schema. It took hours to debug.
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