Call your existing automation ‘zero-token architecture’ to become an instant agentic AI wiz
Kubernetes luminary Kelsey Hightower thinks IT pros need to get smart about thriving in a world that’s trying to hide deep tech
As businesses drink the agentic AI Kool-Aid and go looking for productivity enhancements, IT professionals can deliver by rebranding their existing automations as “zero-token architecture,” according to Kelsey Hightower, a former Google distinguished engineer and a notable early promoter of Kubernetes.
Speaking at Nutanix’s .NEXT conference in Chicago on Wednesday, Hightower said he’s spoken to IT professionals who say they intend to use agentic AI to automatically handle requests for new passwords by parsing users’ requests typed into Slack messages.
“The agent will burn $2 trillion worth of tokens and call an API,” he joked. He also shared a four-letter acronym he recommends as an alternative: B-A-S-H, for the Bash command line tool which he pointed out can use the data transfer tool cURL to automate password resets.
Hightower suggested describing the combination of Bash and cURL as “the zero-token architecture,” because many organizations are starting to introduce token consumption quotas to control their AI bills.
He also recommended continuing to use automation tools like Puppet, Ansible, and Chef, and techniques like storing configuration files in etc/cron.d, but rebranding them.
“Just rename that to etc/agent.d, and you’ll have all these agents doing all these automatic things using the zero-token architecture,” he suggested.
On a more serious note, Hightower suggested cheeky rebranding can help IT pros to keep their jobs as AI enables more, and more sophisticated, automations – if they first develop deep technical skills.
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To show how, he said some careers build 20 years of work on one year of learning.
“They learn how to install Linux, and make no progress after that, or learn how to manage the switches and made no progress after that,” he said.
Hightower thinks IT professionals need to go deeper and develop an understanding of technology platform fundamentals – so-called “hard skills.” But he also thinks soft skills are increasingly important, because the aim of AI and other automation tools is to reduce reliance on hard skills by learning from IT professionals’ experience.
“We train the machines,” he said. “It's your real-life experiences, every bug you fix, everything you share with other people on GitHub, all of that became the training data.”
Automation can’t replace soft skills like intuition, expressing a style, or sharing an opinion based on human experience.
“You know that piece of software is going to crash in the middle of the night, because that's when the backups run,” he said.
“I guarantee you in 10 years, hopefully most of you will still be here,” Hightower added. “Maybe your job will be slightly different. But I guarantee you those that understand the fundamentals will be the most creative among us,” he said. “The people who know the underlying parts of the stack, those are the people who create the new programming languages, they create the new abstractions, because they understand the details below.”
And their soft skills will remain important too, to help IT pros do clever things like knowing when to deploy a zero-token architecture. ®
