After using ChatGPT for everything in my DevOps work — from CI builds to incident triage — I realized certain prompts weren’t just useless… they were slowing me down.
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Look, I’ve been that DevOps engineer who thought AI was going to solve everything. Six months ago, I was throwing every infrastructure problem at ChatGPT like it was some kind of digital oracle. After burning through 100+ prompts across real production workflows — some brilliant, others catastrophically wrong — I learned what NOT to do the hard way.
Here’s what I stopped doing, and why it made all the difference.
1. Prompting Without Role or Context
What I used to do:
"Help me write pipeline config."
But: ChatGPT gave me generic config and missed my specific AWS/GitOps context → huge rework. I got a beautiful Jenkins pipeline when I was using GitHub Actions. Spent 4 hours translating YAML that should’ve taken 30 minutes.
Therefore: I always start prompts with: “You are a senior DevOps engineer building pipelines on AWS with GitOps” so the outputs are relevant.