I find it very difficult to recommend generative ai as a learning tool (specifically for juniors) as it often spits out terrible code (or even straight up not working) which could be mistaken as “good” code. I think the more experienced a dev is, the better it is to use more like a pair programmer.

The problem is it cannot go back and correct/improve already generated output unless prompted to. It is getting better and better, but it is still an overly glorified template generator, for the most part, that often includes import statements from packages that don’t exist, one off functions that could have been inline (cannot go back and correct itself), and numerous garbage variables that are referenced only once and take up heap space for no seemingly no good reason.

Mainly speaking on GPT4, CoPilot is better, both have licensing concerns (of where did it get this code from) if you are creating something real and not for fun.

I am not as familiar with Cloud Native DevOps Newsletter but I do enjoy the podcast

I prefer a similar workflow.

I am a major advocate of keeping CI as simple as possible, and letting build tools do the job they were built to do. Basic builds and unit/component testing. No need for overcomplicating things for the sake of “doing it all in one place”.

CD is where things get dirty, and it really depends on how/what/where you are deploying.

Generally speaking, if integration testing with external systems is necessary, I like to have contract testing with these systems done during CI, then integration/e2e in an environment that mimics production (bonus points if ephemeral).

Thanks for sharing! I will need to look deeper into build kit. Containers aren’t my main artifacts, unfortunately, so I am still building them the ways of old, sounds like.

Be really careful when building images that require secrets for build configuration. Secrets can be passed in as build args, but you MUST UNSET THEM IN THE DOCKERFILE and then repass them in as environment variables at runtime (or else you are leaking your secrets with your image).

Also, image != container. Image is the thing you publish to a registry (e.g. dockerhub). Container is an instance of an image.