DOP 332: 2026 - The Year of Discovery

Episode 332

Show Notes

#332: AI adoption in enterprise software development is accelerating, but operations teams are lagging behind. While application developers embrace AI tools at a rapid pace, those on the ops side remain skeptical—citing concerns about determinism, control, and a general resistance to change. This mirrors previous technology waves like containers, cloud, and Kubernetes, where certain groups initially pushed back before eventually adapting. The prediction for 2026: AI will not see widespread adoption in operations despite its growing presence elsewhere in the software lifecycle.

The bigger challenge facing organizations is not just adopting AI but transforming entire processes to take advantage of it. Improving just one piece of the software delivery pipeline—like development speed—only creates bottlenecks elsewhere. Companies cannot hand developers AI tools while keeping everything else the same and expect transformational results. The future points toward a world where experts bring their own AI agents to companies: personal toolsets trained on their experience and best practices that integrate with organizational systems.

Perhaps the most provocative insight centers on the value of writing code itself. The argument: writing code is the easiest and least valuable part of software development. The real cognitive load comes from thinking through requirements, architecture, and design. Developers who simply translate instructions to code without deeper engagement may find themselves in real danger as AI continues to advance. Darin and Viktor explore these predictions and more as they look ahead to what 2026 might bring for DevOps, platform engineering, and the evolving role of developers.

Frequently Asked Questions

Will AI take over operations in 2026?

Viktor Farcic predicts on DevOps Paradox episode 332 that it will not, even in fully supervised mode, and says he hopes to be wrong. His reasoning is that the roles have swapped. Operations led adoption of containers, virtual machines and cloud while application developers were indifferent; now application developers are adopting AI rapidly and operations is defending the status quo. He calls it a human problem rather than a technological one.

Why do companies see no return on investment from AI?

Viktor Farcic uses an assembly line on DevOps Paradox episode 332: improving one station does not shorten the time to produce a car. Giving developers AI while approvals, testing, security and operations run at the old speed leaves the release date where it was. He points out this is the same pattern as Kubernetes and cloud adoption, arriving faster than before.

Can you feed your existing company documentation to AI?

Viktor Farcic warns on DevOps Paradox episode 332 that it will be a disaster, because three different things exist: what is documented, what people actually do while quietly working around the documentation, and what the process should be now that the pace has changed. He compares it to companies that adopted two week sprints while keeping their annual waterfall release, except this time an individual cannot quietly ignore it.

Does GitOps still matter with AI-driven operations?

Viktor Farcic argues on DevOps Paradox episode 332 that it is needed right now precisely because confidence in AI for operations is close to zero, so a pull request, a human approval and a synchronised apply are the point. His concern is later: an agent that fixes an issue, writes a manifest, then waits minutes for asynchronous polling while checking whether the change landed, turns the process itself into the bottleneck.

Will developers bring their own AI agents to a new employer?

Viktor Farcic says on DevOps Paradox episode 332 that he is certain of it, though he declines to date it. His analogy is hiring a director who brings their previous team along the following week, with the agents in that role. He points out Darin Pope is already partway there, since the prompts a person writes encode their own experience and way of working into a portable tool set.

What is the least valuable thing a developer does?

Viktor Farcic answers on DevOps Paradox episode 332 that it is writing code, and says people will hate him for it. His warning is direct: “you should be very worried if you are one of the people in a company that literally just receives instructions and translates them as-is to code”. He describes his own workload shifting from one feature a week to thinking about several a day.

What is the DevOps Paradox podcast?

DevOps Paradox is a weekly podcast co-hosted by Darin Pope and Viktor Farcic, covering DevOps, platform engineering, and modern software delivery. Episode 332 is the pair’s annual predictions episode for 2026, covering AI in operations, developer experience metrics, GitOps, internal developer platforms, and where the bottleneck moves next. Every episode page carries the audio, the video, and a full transcript.

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Hosts

Darin Pope

Darin Pope

Viktor Farcic

Viktor Farcic

Viktor Farcic is a member of the Google Developer Experts and Docker Captains groups, and published author.

His big passions are DevOps, Containers, Kubernetes, Microservices, Continuous Integration, Delivery and Deployment (CI/CD) and Test-Driven Development (TDD).

He often speaks at community gatherings and conferences.

He has published DevOps Paradox and Test-Driven Java Development.

His random thoughts and tutorials can be found in his blog The DevOps Toolkit.