DOP 376: Secrets Management for AI Agents

#376: How many secrets can your coding agent reach right now? You gave it a token so it could get work done. It might have passed that token to every agent it spun up. Somewhere along the way, you stopped reading the permission prompts and started clicking allow. At the same time, hardcoding secrets in our code is still the most common answer for how secrets are managed. Developers get paid to close tickets, not to lower risk, and the agents just copy whatever they find in the repo. In this episode, we speak with Dwayne McDaniel, Principal Developer Advocate at GitGuardian, about managing secrets when agents are the ones using them, and why the better answer might be no secrets at all.   Dwayne's contact information: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dwaynemcdaniel/   YouTube channel: https://youtube.com/devopsparadox   Review the podcast on Apple Podcasts: https://www.devopsparadox.com/review-podcast/   Slack: https://www.devopsparadox.com/slack/   Connect with us at: https://www.devopsparadox.com/contact/

#375: An agent can crank out 200 or 300 lines of code a minute. You can maybe review 40. So who's actually supposed to understand what just got merged? Maybe nobody ever did. Did you really read every line of every PR before AI showed up? Or did you just have the time? Now the junior has an agent, the senior is buried in review, and the job looks a lot more like management than coding. In this episode, Darin and Viktor talk about who's supposed to understand the code once AI writes it, and why that's now the senior engineer's job.   YouTube channel: https://youtube.com/devopsparadox   Review the podcast on Apple Podcasts: https://www.devopsparadox.com/review-podcast/   Slack: https://www.devopsparadox.com/slack/   Connect with us at: https://www.devopsparadox.com/contact/

#374: Your company is paying for the AI licenses, and now there's a number attached. Two to three times the output, every day, or else. Can you hit it? If they're counting lines of code, sure. But you aren't the company. If everyone on the team gets faster on their own and the handoffs between them stay exactly the same, does anything ship sooner? Most AI today is single player. Your company probably isn't. In this episode, we speak with Tomasz Tunguz, founder of Theory Ventures, about why faster individuals don't add up to a faster company, and what that changes for startups and the people funding them.   Tomasz's contact information: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tomasztunguz/ X: https://x.com/ttunguz   YouTube channel: https://youtube.com/devopsparadox   Review the podcast on Apple Podcasts: https://www.devopsparadox.com/review-podcast/   Slack: https://www.devopsparadox.com/slack/   Connect with us at: https://www.devopsparadox.com/contact/

#373: A company lays off 4,000 people the same day it posts record revenue, and the stock jumps. Is that really because of AI? Or just a really good press release? Layoffs used to mean a company was bleeding cash. Now they show up next to record quarters, and AI gets the credit. Doesn't matter much if you're the one who got rapidly reallocated. You still need a job. In this episode, Darin and Viktor talk about AI as the current layoff scapegoat and what to do when you end up on the wrong side of it.   YouTube channel: https://youtube.com/devopsparadox   Review the podcast on Apple Podcasts: https://www.devopsparadox.com/review-podcast/   Slack: https://www.devopsparadox.com/slack/   Connect with us at: https://www.devopsparadox.com/contact/

#372: Your company bought everyone a ChatGPT or Claude license. Problem solved, right? A few people never touch it. Most use it like a drive-through window -- type a question, grab the answer, leave. And the ones using it all day for emails assume that makes them good at it. But think about it. Your kid had to pass a written test before driving the car. Your team got the keys and a login. In this episode, we speak with Chris Daigle, founder and CEO of ChiefAIOfficer.com, about what actually turns daily AI use into real skill.   Chris's contact information: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/doctordaigle/   YouTube channel: https://youtube.com/devopsparadox   Review the podcast on Apple Podcasts: https://www.devopsparadox.com/review-podcast/   Slack: https://www.devopsparadox.com/slack/   Connect with us at: https://www.devopsparadox.com/contact/

#371: You've got an idea, two friends, and a coding agent. Why would you pay for a CRM when you can vibe code one this weekend? Day one, it looks great. You love it. Then day 30 shows up. Somebody else needs access, a new feature breaks an old one, and you're asking yourself where this thing is even hosted. Pretty soon you're spending more time maintaining your CRM than running your business. In this episode, we speak with Eddie Cliff, VP and GM of SMB and Growth Products at Salesforce, about when to build and when to buy.   Eddie's contact information: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/eddiecliff/ X: https://x.com/eddiecliff   YouTube channel: https://youtube.com/devopsparadox   Review the podcast on Apple Podcasts: https://www.devopsparadox.com/review-podcast/   Slack: https://www.devopsparadox.com/slack/   Connect with us at: https://www.devopsparadox.com/contact/

#370: Will AI replace QA testers? Three years ago, manual testers were told to learn automation or find another job. Now the automation engineers are hearing the same thing about AI. Same speech, new audience. Here's the thing. Nobody can test everything. Somebody still has to decide what quality means for your product and which workflows can't break, and your team is shipping ten times the code it used to. The conveyor belt got faster. You still have two eyes. In this episode, we speak with Shubha Govil, Chief Product Officer at Sauce Labs, about why the testing roles stay but the work doesn't.   Shubha's contact information: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shubhagovil/   YouTube channel: https://youtube.com/devopsparadox   Review the podcast on Apple Podcasts: https://www.devopsparadox.com/review-podcast/   Slack: https://www.devopsparadox.com/slack/   Connect with us at: https://www.devopsparadox.com/contact/

#369: Vibe coding is great until it isn't, and the until part usually shows up fast. Ten different ways to calculate sales tax. An agent that switches programming languages in the middle of a request. One team on NodeJS, another on Python, and nobody with a rule about either. So who's supposed to stop that? Turns out that's a job now. Somebody has to tell the agents what they can and can't do, encode it, and then prove it held. In this episode, we speak with Dan Fernandez, Vice President of Product for Developer Services at Salesforce, about harness engineering, what actually counts as slop, and why Heroku isn't dead. Disclosure: Salesforce paid for Darin's travel and hotel to attend Dreamforce 2026. They did not review, approve, or influence this episode. The questions, the opinions, and the editing are ours.   Dan's contact information: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/danfernandez/   YouTube channel: https://youtube.com/devopsparadox   Review the podcast on Apple Podcasts: https://www.devopsparadox.com/review-podcast/   Slack: https://www.devopsparadox.com/slack/   Connect with us at: https://www.devopsparadox.com/contact/

#368: You're faster with AI. Your teammates are faster with AI. More tickets closed, more deployments going out than a year ago. So why can't anybody in the building answer a simple question: are we shipping more value? Jeff's take is that the bottleneck didn't go away, it moved. Code got cheap. Deciding what to build, why, and whether it actually worked did not. That's not an engineering problem anymore. It's a product problem. In this episode, we speak with Jeff Keyes, Field CTO at Allstacks, about where the bottleneck went once AI made coding cheap, and why product people have to pick up the tools next.   Jeff's contact information: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeffdkeyes/   YouTube channel: https://youtube.com/devopsparadox   Review the podcast on Apple Podcasts: https://www.devopsparadox.com/review-podcast/   Slack: https://www.devopsparadox.com/slack/   Connect with us at: https://www.devopsparadox.com/contact/

#367: Every few weeks another pitch lands. A company with no employees, just a founder and an army of AI agents. Zero headcount. Zero payroll. Then the AI CMO hallucinates a marketing campaign and somebody has to catch it. Viktor runs the numbers on his own one-person operation. He can review maybe five things a night. Want a hundred a day? That is nineteen more people. The math is not kind to the pitch. In this episode, Darin and Viktor discuss why zero-human is the new serverless, and where the humans actually go once the agents are doing the work.   YouTube channel: https://youtube.com/devopsparadox   Review the podcast on Apple Podcasts: https://www.devopsparadox.com/review-podcast/   Slack: https://www.devopsparadox.com/slack/   Connect with us at: https://www.devopsparadox.com/contact/