DOP 360: What Is an AI SRE?

More from DevOps Paradox All episodes →

1. 

   E365 · 26 Aug 2026 · 48 min

   DOP 365: What the DORA AI ROI Report Really Says

   #365: A bad engineer with a laptop is much worse than a bad engineer with a calculator. Now hand that engineer AI. DORA's ROI report puts it politely - AI without engineering excellence just scales your problems. Except it's not more of everything. It's more of whatever you were already doing, and there's a statistical chance that what you're doing is bad. Your agent already read your flaky tests and decided that's the house style. So what do you measure now? Viktor's answer: every technical metric you've got is gamed. ROI of AI-assisted Software Development report…

2. 

   E364 · 19 Aug 2026 · 48 min

   DOP 364: How to Avoid Burnout as a Leader

   #364: Your CEO comes back from a leadership offsite talking about burnout-proof leadership and AI transformation at scale. Two weeks later you're working through lunch, you're working through dinner, and Slack never stops. Deployment frequency is up. Incidents are up worse. So who was that program actually protecting? In this episode, we speak with Dr. Victoria Mensch, Founder and CEO of the Silicon Valley Executive Academy, about what really goes on at those offsites, and why Nokia, BlackBerry and Blockbuster all saw it coming anyway. Victoria's contact information: LinkedIn:…

3. 

   E363 · 12 Aug 2026 · 44 min

   DOP 363: Is Your Website Agent-Ready?

   #363: Three waves of the web, and you are late for the third one. The 90s were about getting a browser to render your page at all. The early 2000s were about SEO, or as Darin puts it, sell me all the ads ready. Now it is agent ready, and Cloudflare built a scoreboard for it at [isitagentready.com](https://isitagentready.com/). The devopsparadox.com site scored about 70 out of 100 and then went down when Cloudflare added new checks. Run yours. You will be sad. Viktor thinks the framing is slightly off, though, and the correction is the good part. Optimizing for agents that browse your site is…

4. 

   E362 · 5 Aug 2026 · 48 min

   DOP 362: Feature Flags vs Canary Deployments

   #362: Feature flags or canary deployments - do you need both? Viktor puts it to Alex Casalboni from Unleash, who says he argues about this with his colleagues roughly every day, and the answer lands clean. Switching a hostname, a database, an API vendor? That is infrastructure, nothing to do with who the user is, so keep your canaries and your blue-green. But a canary switches one thing at a time. Try running three A/B tests and ten behavioral changes through it and the whole approach buckles. Anything that needs to know who the user is belongs in a flag. Different layers of the stack,…

5. 

   E361 · 29 Jul 2026 · 42 min

   DOP 361: When Code Got Cheap, Reviewing Got Expensive

   #361: Picture a 6,000-line pull request landing in your project from someone you've never heard of. Every test passes - yours, theirs, all of it. And you can tell it was generated. Not assisted. Generated. What do you do with it? Viktor's first move is to poke the premise: how do you even know it was generated and not assisted? You can't. Nobody can. That distinction is already gone. So the real question isn't whether AI wrote it. It's what a maintainer is for. Viktor's answer is blunt - a maintainer's first job is to guide people in and help them contribute, and if you think your job is…

6. 

   E359 · 15 Jul 2026 · 42 min

   DOP 359: Demos in the Age of AI Agents

   #359: When was the last time you sat through a 30-minute product demo and walked away actually knowing anything? You would learn more from five minutes hands-on than an hour of watching someone else drive. Now you have help. An agent can watch the 30-minute video, play in the sandbox, read every page of the docs, and come back before you finish your coffee with a verdict - tried it, does not work, next. The agent is the new tire kicker. So if you are a vendor, an open source maintainer, or the person building the internal app nobody outside the building ever sees, the demo you have been…

7. 

   E358 · 8 Jul 2026 · 50 min

   DOP 358: Just-in-Time Access for AI Agents

   #358: Production is on fire. You need access to one table you have never touched. So you file an access request, then phone the desk to say you filed it, then Slack them to say you phoned, then walk over to say you Slacked. Twenty-five minutes later the incident has resolved itself and the customer has already left. That is the setup, and Ofir Stein has lived the other side of it. He is the CTO and co-founder of Apono, and before that he was an engineering leader who felt the same pain every day - not because he hated security, but because he hated being blocked. There is a difference, and…

8. 

   E357 · 1 Jul 2026 · 57 min

   DOP 357: What Is Spec-Driven Development?

   #357: Type a prompt, get code, fix the hallucinations, type another prompt. That is vibe coding, and it is a fine place to start. It is a terrible place to stay. So what comes next - and is spec-driven development actually it, or just waterfall wearing a new hat? Here is the reframe that runs the whole conversation: everybody already works from a spec. Even the person who swears they are winging it has a spec in their head - which language, where it runs, what it does. The real question was never specs or no specs. It is whether you write them like waterfall, one giant document before anyone…

9. 

   E356 · 24 Jun 2026 · 48 min

   DOP 356: Warehouse Robots Are a Distributed System

   #356: Fleet management means one thing to a DevOps engineer and something completely different to Tomas Kovacovsky. To Viktor it is a CD problem - a fleet of Kubernetes clusters he would rather not babysit. To Tomas it is hundreds of physical robots rolling around a warehouse, picking orders, dodging each other, and working very hard not to lose their connectivity. Tomas is the CTO of Brightpick, where the robots are not the kind you yell at for bumping into a chair. They are three-meter-tall autonomous pickers - some telescoping up to six - that find their way using lidar, recognize items…

10. 

    E355 · 17 Jun 2026 · 56 min

    DOP 355: Why AI Coding Slows Down Code Review

    #355: Picture your engineering team a year from now. A coding agent doing the coding. A testing agent on tests. A security agent on security. An infrastructure agent on infrastructure. All of them wired into GitHub and Jira, all of them working right alongside the humans. Not science fiction either - Atlassian and GitHub are already shipping these features. So out come the stats everyone loves to quote. AI code introduces 1.7 times more issues. Half of it ships with security holes. Code duplication is through the roof. AI-assisted PRs take four to five times longer to review. The response to…