CfgMgmtCamp 2026
While the conference schedule was packed with "GenAI" sessions, the reality on the ground was a shock. Most attendees are still just dipping their toes in, while I realized I’ve accidentally moved to the vanguard. Here is why the AI revolution feels different when you're ahead of the curve.
Gonna do something a little different this year and not talk about the sessions, but rather the vibes of the conference. So let’s go!
I looked at the schedule and noticed about 50% of the talks were "doing this with GenAI," "how I used AI for X," or "how LLMs made my breakfast." I went in thinking everyone must be all-in by now—using Copilot to code, dropping docs into RAG frameworks, and deploying agents left and right. Right?
Apparently not. In a room of 50 people, when the speaker asked who had never used one of the "Big 4" (ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Copilot), two people raised their hands. In a DevOps conference? That’s like asking who has never fried an egg in a room full of Michelin-star chefs. Something does not compute.
Similarly, I expected most slide decks to be AI-augmented. Then one speaker announced their talk was entirely human-generated, and the audience went wild. I get that AI "art" is a moral minefield for some, but not even using it to proofread or sharpen your points? At a tech conference? What’s up with that?
The proof was in the pudding: I asked everyone I met how they were using AI. To my surprise, the majority said, "to create boilerplate now and then," "to debug logs occasionally," or "to summarize an article." I expected to find Claude power users leveraging agents to 10x their velocity. Instead, most were just dipping their toes in. I only found one other person "vibing" at my level.
Then there were the talks. One was titled "Can you vibecode a production-ready app in 30 minutes?" It was interesting, but honestly, that’s what I did a few Sundays ago while slightly inebriated and bored. Cutting-edge tech is what I do for fun on the weekend now? I’ve attended this conference for years, always sitting in awe of the cloud, Docker, or Kubernetes experts, thinking, I want to be able to do that. I’ve spent my life playing catch-up. But with this AI revolution? I’m on the vanguard. I’m ahead of the curve. It’s a very weird experience.
Last year, there was exactly one talk about AI, given by Patrick Debois. Since he coined "DevOps" back in 2007, you listen when he identifies a shift. This year, the "thought leaders" were all talking AI. Spoiler alert: they’re right.
Will the bubble burst? Absolutely. But who do you think gets let go when it does? The person writing every line by hand, or the engineer who mastered prompting and oversees agents churning out high-quality output? AI is here to stay. Embrace it.
There will still be shops where hand-written code is the standard, just as there are still shops where servers are configured manually. But we’ll call them "legacy." It’s not where the fun is, it’s not where the money is, and it’s definitely not where the future is.