DevConf.US 2026

Richard Mitchell

Richard Mitchell is a Principal Engineer at Red Hat with 30+ years in software development, big data, and AI. He's a member of the ACE team, driving success for internal and external AI projects. Outside of work, he teaches motorcycle riding and crafts artisan chocolate bon bons.

Job title:

Principal Engineer

Company or affiliation:

Red Hat


Session

09-24
16:40
35min
Infusing GitOps Pipelines with LLM-Powered Manifest Intelligence
Hema Veeradhi, Richard Mitchell

In the world of GitOps, a successful sync doesn't always mean a healthy application. Standard static analysis tools like kube-linter or kubeconform are excellent at catching syntax errors, but they often produce fragmented, noisy data that leaves developers guessing at the "why" and "how to fix".
This session introduces LLM-powered skills. Skills provide focused context and real-time retrieval without external dependencies, making them ideal for secure, offline infrastructure environments.

Using a Manifest-Validator plugin, we demonstrate how to equip ArgoCD with specialized, modular abilities that go beyond simple text generation. We will deep-dive into:
1) The Sidecar Architecture: How we consolidated linter outputs and model configurations into app-specific ConfigMaps to create a self-contained validation engine
2) Actionable Remediation: How the generated diagnostic reports can help provide developers with root cause analysis
3) The Live Audit: How the AI skills inspects live cluster resources to suggest security hardening and cost optimization opportunities based on production best practices

Attendees will leave with a blueprint for building agentic DevOps tools that don't just find problems, but possess the specialized expertise to solve them.

DevOps and Automation
101 (Capacity 48)