AI Is Great at Reasoning. Stop Using It for Workflows.

More than a year ago, which is practically ancient history in the AI years, I wrote a blog about using AI to build new self-service capabilities. It felt like the future. We built a self-service action that could create new self-service actions, helping us move faster, reduce bottlenecks, and scale a small Platform Engineering team supporting hundreds of developers. One of the most interesting parts was using Amazon Bedrock to generate Terraform code dynamically at runtime, allowing the system to determine how a new cloud resource should be provisioned using our existing Terraform modules. It worked. It was impressive. And… we removed it. Looking back, abandoning that approach turned out to be one of the best engineering decisions we made. At the time, it felt like an isolated technical decision. It wasn’t. Recently, we faced a much smaller problem. We wanted to automate the creation of DNS records in Cloudflare through our self-service platform. The first proposal was exactly what you’d expect today: “Let’s build a Claude Skill.” Immediately, I had a strong sense of deja vu. But my hesitation wasn’t about whether AI could do it — it was about whether it should. We were simply asking the wrong question. The Industry Shift A lot of engineers today feel like everything they learned over the last decade suddenly became less relevant. We are DevOps engineers. We are Platform Engineers. We used to spend time designing systems, defining standards, reviewing architectures, and planning before writing a single line of code. Every automation started with the same question: “How should we automate this?” Today, that question has quietly changed. Now we ask: “How can AI do this?” At first glance, that sounds like progress. And sometimes it is. Large Language Models have fundamentally changed the way we build software. Tasks that used to take hours now take minutes, and entire prototypes appear from a single prompt. The temptation is obvious. If AI can do it… why not let AI do