The phrase “AI infrastructure” now means two different things. One is the GPUs, schedulers, and MLOps platforms that exist to run AI workloads. The other is AI that runs infrastructure: agents and assistants that generate, deploy, and govern cloud resources on your behalf. They’re different markets with different vendors, and most teams need to think about both.
Last fall, after launching Pulumi Neo, we wrote up 10 things you could do with it. In the months that followed, as platform teams handed Neo more real work, we watched and listened, shipping a steady stream of features like plan mode, read-only mode, AGENTS.md, an integration catalog, cross-cloud migration, and task sharing. With today’s release, Neo extends beyond the Pulumi Cloud console into the Pulumi CLI, GitHub, and Slack.
So here are 10 more things you can do with Neo.
The original dark factory was Fanuc’s robotics plant in Oshino, Japan, where the lights are off because nobody is on the floor. Robots build robots. Parts move through the line for weeks at a time without a person walking past them.
The same pattern is now showing up in software. Three engineers at StrongDM shipped roughly 32,000 lines of production code without writing or reviewing any of it. Stripe’s “Minions” agent system merges over a thousand pull requests every week. In January, Dan Shapiro of Glowforge published a five-level autonomy ladder that landed cleanly enough to become the shorthand most people now use, and BCG put out a piece calling it the dark software factory.
Almost every public writeup so far is about application code. The harder question is what this looks like for infrastructure.
Somewhere in your company right now, a developer is building an AI agent. Maybe it’s a release agent that cuts tags when tests pass. Maybe it’s a cost agent that shuts down idle EC2 overnight. It’s running, it’s in production, and there’s a decent chance the platform team doesn’t know it exists.
This isn’t a thought experiment. OutSystems just surveyed 1,900 IT leaders and the numbers are rough: 96% of enterprises run AI agents in production today, 94% say the sprawl is becoming a real security problem, and only 12% have any central way to manage it. Twelve percent. You can read the full report here.
The real question is where those agents run. Inside the platform you’ve already built, or somewhere off to the side where nobody on the platform team can see them.
Amsterdam in late March still has that sharp North Sea wind, but inside the RAI Convention Centre, 13,350 people generated enough energy to heat the building twice over. KubeCon + CloudNativeCon EU 2026 was the biggest European edition yet, and the shift from previous years was impossible to miss. AI dominated the conference.
Platform teams need visibility into package adoption at scale. Responding to security advisories, planning deprecations, and tracking version sprawl all require knowing which stacks run which package versions across your organization.
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.
AI coding assistants have transformed how developers write software, including infrastructure code. Tools like Claude Code, Cursor, and GitHub Copilot can generate code, explain complex systems, and automate tedious tasks. But when it comes to infrastructure, these tools often produce code that works but misses the mark on patterns that matter: proper secret handling, correct resource dependencies, idiomatic component structure, and the dozens of other details that separate working infrastructure from production-ready infrastructure.
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.
Every organization builds up knowledge over time: naming standards, compliance requirements, patterns your team has settled on, and proven approaches to common tasks. Until now, bringing this knowledge into Neo meant repeating it manually each time - specifying preferences, describing how your team works, and recreating prompts that someone already perfected.
Two new features change this. Custom Instructions teach Neo your standards so it applies them automatically. Slash Commands capture proven prompts so anyone on your team can use them with a keystroke.
