An AI agent on a scheduled idle walk through my notes pointed out that I’d built the same architecture three times — at work, in my homelab, and in my second brain — and that the third copy was missing the part that makes GitOps work. It was right. So we shipped the missing piece the same day.
Raw YAML, Kustomize, Helm, Jsonnet — there’s more than one way to describe what you want running in a cluster. Here’s what each actually looks like in practice and where each one breaks.
Manual kubectl in production is the Kubernetes equivalent of SSH’ing into a server and editing files. It works until it doesn’t, and when it doesn’t, nobody knows why.
A common interview question in 2026. If your answer is ‘kubeconfig in a CI secret’, you’re not wrong — but you’re also not getting the job.
I wanted to learn production-grade Kubernetes patterns without breaking production. One node, a full GitOps stack, and a hard rule: no manual kubectl after bootstrap.