https://ryantodd.dev/blog Notes on AI, operational automation, cloud infrastructure, and platform engineering. en-us rmtodd618@gmail.com (Ryan Todd) rmtodd618@gmail.com (Ryan Todd) Wed, 15 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://ryantodd.dev/blog/teaching-the-pipeline-to-explain-its-own-failures https://ryantodd.dev/blog/teaching-the-pipeline-to-explain-its-own-failures Pipeline notifications tell you that a build failed, never why. I added an on-failure step that reads the log, scrubs it, and asks an LLM to explain what actually broke. The model turned out to be the easy part — deciding what to send it was the engineering. Wed, 15 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT rmtodd618@gmail.com (Ryan Todd) ci-cdazure-devopsaiplatform-engineeringsre https://ryantodd.dev/blog/what-release-engineering-actually-owns https://ryantodd.dev/blog/what-release-engineering-actually-owns Release engineering keeps getting confused with DevOps, with SRE, and with "the team that owns Jenkins." After several years of doing it at Principal level, here is what I think the job actually is — and what the wrong answer looks like. Thu, 28 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT rmtodd618@gmail.com (Ryan Todd) release-engineeringsreci-cdplatform-engineering