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by danw1979 387 days ago
This is a fine example of a process you really want to be deterministic being automated using something that is definitely not.
3 comments

I did something similar in my hobby project - the agent was promoted, among the other things, to copy a signature from a build artifact into a json file. It worked fine until it didn’t - one day Claude 4 Sonnet randomly flipped one letter in the signature to something else. It wasn’t the end of the world, I catched the error because I always manually test if the release worked, but it shows that AI tools should not be used as execution engines for CI/CD workflows. It’s slow, inefficient and error prone. Just ask the AI to help you write a proper workflow with code.
> It’s slow, inefficient and error prone.

And really expensive, which is why AI companies want you to do that.

> Just ask the AI to help you write a proper workflow with code.

This.

I'm with you here and likely the next step would be yelling to to Cloud - basically the same and as we see how widespread Clouds are
Thanks for pointing out something which by some is considered unpopular. Use AI tools all you want but wherever you want deterministic outcome - current generation isn't up to that level.

We must acknowledge, understand and work around a technology's limitations.

What is the deterministic alternative you suggest?

I’m not endorsing this release practice in particular, it scares me. But I have been involved in a lot of automation projects where perfection was the initial goal, and then abandoned because it was obvious that non-automated work was so imperfect. Human error is a fact of life.

I am a DevOps Engineer, all the thing that he described in the prompt can be just done by Github Actions except the summary of the PR.

I don't condemn using LLM, but at least they could have use it in order to write better Github Actions instead.

If you really have to use an IA, at least use it to generate code once and use that. This way it's deterministic and you get a chance to understand what happens and to debug issues.

Not sure why IA could create something you couldn't however. And at least understanding what happens if part of the bundle.

The sibling comment from M4v3R covered this well.
Did it? I didn’t see a claim that doing this work manually had a zero error rate.

Again, I would probably not do this. But let’s not pretend that non-AI release processes prevent all issues. We’re really talking different kinds of errors, and the ai driven ones tend to be obviously wrong. At least right now.

What I didn’t say was that “all devops release pipelines that use traditional scripted approaches are error free”.