While on the surface I'd agree with you, in reality I think operations people are going to be around longer than developers at this rate.
It's fairly "easy" and relatively safe to let an AI loose on your Java code base and use it to add new features or find bugs. Very few people would let a similar AI roam around production servers and databases.
If you collect enough logs, exceptions/crash dumps, network traffic and so on, you could feed that to the AI and have it tell you why a service crashed. The majority of my job as an operations person is to figure out why something crashed with only a subset of that information and being able to read the code and reason about why current circumstances resulted in the crash or data corruption. Sometimes the job is even to implement the stuff the developers didn't, while not actually touching the code and relying on what the operating system, database, web server or network tells you.
If developers where better, or had more time, more resource then yes, an AI could do the job faster and better. In current environment, operations is pretty safe.
I sure hope so. But realistically AI will thin the devops herd much more rapidly than "proper" development teams. I already use an LLM to crank out my configs, shell scripts, analyse my logs etc. LLMs are a lot better at these things than full fledged development. I think I am now able to do in days what it would have taken me weeks. My employer does not need to hire as many devops people as it would have pre LLMs.
As you can see you don't need to give AI write access to your production environment.
DevOps isn't really ops though, right? As in, not product ops. It's ops but for devs, so it's rare for them to have to handle production servers. At least, I hope so. Those would be SRE or even sysadmins, right? I'm not up to date on the usage of the term though haha.
It's fairly "easy" and relatively safe to let an AI loose on your Java code base and use it to add new features or find bugs. Very few people would let a similar AI roam around production servers and databases.
If you collect enough logs, exceptions/crash dumps, network traffic and so on, you could feed that to the AI and have it tell you why a service crashed. The majority of my job as an operations person is to figure out why something crashed with only a subset of that information and being able to read the code and reason about why current circumstances resulted in the crash or data corruption. Sometimes the job is even to implement the stuff the developers didn't, while not actually touching the code and relying on what the operating system, database, web server or network tells you.
If developers where better, or had more time, more resource then yes, an AI could do the job faster and better. In current environment, operations is pretty safe.