Agentic CI/CD with Solomon Hykes of Dagger

**Bret Fisher** (0:00)
We're not just defending against code now, we're defending against any untrusted text that will somehow sneak into the context window. And I started to see some of these reports and examples of how easy it is to make your LLM do rogue, crazy stuff, one line commit on some instruction file marked down in a Git repo somewhere, and suddenly the LLM is now trying to delete databases, right, because you convinced it to.

**Solomon Hykes** (0:23)
I saw a joke about that. I was like, oh, now we have SQL injection as like a required service for development, right?

**Bret Fisher** (0:33)
Welcome to the Agentic DevOps Podcast, and I'm your host, Bret Fisher. I'm joined in this episode by my fantastic co-host, Nirmal Mehta of AWS, and our very special guest, there should be a drum roll here, Solomon Hykes of Dagger. We didn't need the drum roll. We've had Solomon on the show before, but this is a special one. I think it's pretty special for three reasons. One, Solomon being the co-founder of.cloud, then the co-founder of Docker, and then the co-founder of Dagger gives him a unique perspective and clarity of thought about what's happening on the ground with AI and AI agents in software engineering. Two, we deep dive into many different topics around the intersection of AI, software development, CICD, the new Model Context Protocol, AI in containers, and the act of letting autonomous non-deterministic crazy texting robots into our infrastructure in CI. And three, lastly, because Solomon's the one who reached out to me in early 2025, and helped me see the shift that was happening with the invention of Agentic AI and was one of the inspirations for starting this second podcast, focused just on how AI would be automating our DevOps soon. I will tell you this episode is free from hype, because Solomon is known for being thoughtful and someone who avoids hyperbole. And we need that right now when talking about AI and agents. Honestly, I enjoyed this conversation and Solomon's insights so much, I'm probably going to listen to it again myself, because it was a long one, but it was packed, I felt like, with good insights and conversations. So, please enjoy this chat with Solomon Hykes of Dagger. Hey, DevOps fans, I'm putting my own ad in this episode because I've got a new course coming out that I'm calling GitHub Actions for DevOps in the Age of AI. Yeah, that title definitely needs some work, but here's what's happening. I've been consulting and teaching GitHub Actions for half a decade, and while building this course over the last few years, I realized that an increasing problem for teams is how they plan to use AI in their CI. There's a lot of hype out there around AI and what works and what doesn't, so I'm testing AI workflows and talking to the leaders in automation about LLMs in our pipelines. This will be an end-to-end GitHub Actions course for both new Action users and a lot of advanced production-ready advice for those already using Actions. Then, I'm layering on top AI Actions and AI Agents so that you don't have to spend all the time I'm spending figuring out what's real and what's AI slop. The full course won't be done for months, but I've launched a wait list where you can get some mini-lessons as I make them, get a course discount when it launches, and the thing I'm really excited about is letting some people in early to help me test the course and provide feedback on how to make this course even better. The learning will be project-based and I'll be developing some of it in the open while streaming on YouTube and Twitch. So if you're interested in any of that, there's a wait list sign up in the show notes or just go to brettfisher.com. All right, so let's get back to the episode.
Solomon, hi.

**Solomon Hykes** (4:03)
Hello.

**Bret Fisher** (4:04)
I'm the co-founder of a startup called Dagger, dagger.io, and before that, I was the co-founder of Docker. And that's a total of 15 years of my life, 10 years at Docker, five years at Dagger. So that's me in a nutshell, a lot of developer tools, a lot of containers, a lot of open source. Yeah, I'm just excited, grateful that I still get to build things and people care enough to use it and complain to me about the bugs. That's all a builder can ask for, really.

**Solomon Hykes** (4:34)
Hi, I'm Nirmal Mehta. I'm a Principal Specialist Solution Architect at AWS, a Docker Captain and really good friends with Brett. Today, I'm not an AI. On top of that, opinions expressed are solely my own and do not express the views or opinions of my employers.