In the DevOps Paradox episode 2026 — The Year of Discovery, Viktor and Darin talk about how software work is changing, but the bottlenecks aren’t where people think.
A few quotes are basically a version of why we started SuperPlane. My comments below.
You cannot just give developers, here’s AI. Everything else stays the same… you need to change the whole assembly line.
Most organizations are currently applying AI to optimize the coding process.
The constraint will simply move downstream: releases, verification, coordination, incident handling.
If you don’t address the system, you get faster queues, not faster outcomes.
You have a platform that you can say, hey, give me a database, and you get that database. And that database is done based on your company's best practices, rules, policies [...] ask me questions that I need to answer and don't ask anything more.
This is what engineers are actually asking for: outcomes, and systems that hide incidental complexity without hiding state.
People simply don’t want to… relinquish part of their power… [and] don’t want to introduce randomness in production.
This is the hard part. It’s not so much a capability problem as much it's a trust problem. People will only use automation in production when it’s controllable, auditable, and fails in predictable ways.
To get there, I think we need a control plane that makes cross-tool operational workflows explicit and inspectable: what triggered, what ran, what it touched, and what evidence it produced. If you can’t explain a change, you can’t safely automate it.
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