Engin Diri

Engin Diri

Customer Experience Architect

Token Efficiency vs Cognitive Efficiency: Choosing IaC for AI Agents

Token Efficiency vs Cognitive Efficiency: Choosing IaC for AI Agents

When an AI agent writes infrastructure code, two things matter: how compact the output is (token efficiency) and how well the model actually reasons about what it’s writing (cognitive efficiency). HCL produces fewer tokens for the same resource. But does that make it the better choice when agents need to refactor, debug, and iterate? We ran a benchmark across Claude Opus 4.6 and GPT-5.2-Codex to find out.

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GitOps Best Practices I Wish I Had Known Before

GitOps Best Practices I Wish I Had Known Before

Getting started with GitOps can feel like trying to herd cats through a YAML factory while the factory is on fire. It’s one of those things that seems like it ought to be simple (just use Git!), but in practice is much more complex — and you may not realize how much more complex until you’re weeks or more into a project. After years of running GitOps workflows in production across dozens of clusters, I’ve collected a list of best practices that I’m hoping can save you from having to make many of the mistakes I’ve made. Think of it as the GitOps cheat sheet I wish I’d had from Day 1.

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The Claude Skills I Actually Use for DevOps

The Claude Skills I Actually Use for DevOps

When Claude Code first released skills, I ignored them. They looked like fancy prompts, another feature to add to the pile of things I would get around to learning eventually. Then I watched a few engineers demonstrate what skills actually do, and something clicked. By default, language models do not write good code. They write plausible code based on what they have read. Plausible code turns into bugs, horrible UX, and infrastructure that breaks at 3am.

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Deploy OpenClaw on AWS or Hetzner Securely with Pulumi and Tailscale

Update (January 2026): The lobster has molted into its final form! From Clawdbot to Moltbot to OpenClaw. With 100k+ GitHub stars and 2M visitors in a week, the project finally has a name that’ll stick. The CLI command is now openclaw and the new handle is @openclaw. Same mission: AI that actually does things. Your assistant. Your machine. Your rules. See the official getting started guide for updated installation instructions.

OpenClaw is everywhere right now. The open-source AI assistant gained 9,000 GitHub stars in a single day, received public praise from former Tesla AI head Andrej Karpathy, and has sparked a global run on Mac Minis as developers scramble to give this “lobster assistant” a home. Users are calling it “Jarvis living in a hard drive” and “Claude with hands”—the personal AI assistant that Siri promised but never delivered.

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How Ralph Wiggum Built a Serverless SaaS with Pulumi

I was about to do something that felt either genius or completely reckless: hand over my AWS credentials to an AI and step away from my computer. The technique is called “Ralph Wiggum,” named after the Simpsons character who eats glue and says “I’m in danger” while everything burns around him. And honestly, that felt about right for what I was attempting.

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How to Move to the Gateway API: post ingress-nginx Retirement

The upcoming retirement of ingress-nginx in early 2026 gives infrastructure teams both a deadline and an opportunity to rethink traffic management. Configuring the Ingress API often meant relying on controller-specific annotations that varied between implementations. The Gateway API offers a cleaner, standardized alternative. This post investigates the practical reality of this migration and explores why kgateway emerges as a robust solution for the future.

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From 'Works on My Machine' to Production-Ready: Building AI Agents with Amazon Bedrock AgentCore

Every developer building AI agents knows the gap between a working prototype and production deployment. Your fraud detection agent works perfectly on your laptop, but how do you deploy it with proper authentication, memory persistence, observability, and guardrails? This post walks through a complete journey from local development to production-ready AI agents using Amazon Bedrock AgentCore, the Strands SDK, and Pulumi.

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AI Predictions for 2026: A DevOps Engineer's Guide

The IDE is dying, and so is tool calling. OpenAI is not going to win. And next year, you’re going to be shipping code that you’ve never reviewed before, even as an experienced engineer.

These are bold claims, but the way we use AI in 2026 for coding and agents is going to look completely different. In this post, I want to cover my predictions and why they matter right now for DevOps engineers. Some of these are definitely hot takes, but that’s what makes this conversation worth having.

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Grounded AI: Why Neo Knows Your Infrastructure

Ask a generic LLM to “fix my broken deployment,” and you’ll get generic advice. Ask Pulumi Neo the same question, and you’ll get a fix plan grounded in your actual infrastructure state.

The difference isn’t about better prompts or newer models. It’s about what the AI actually knows. Generic LLMs have been trained on the internet. Neo has been trained on your infrastructure.

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