Demos in the Age of AI Agents

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**Viktor Farcic** (0:30)
The goal of everybody should be to make on every single level life of agents easier. That's the current goal.
Whether that's MCP, whether that's CLI, whether that's skills, whether that's not blocking your website from agents, it can be many different things. But that's the current job.

**Darin Pope** (0:51)
This is DevOps Paradox, episode number 359, Demos in the Age of AI Agents.
Welcome to DevOps Paradox. This is a podcast about random stuff in which we, Darren and Victor, pretend we know what we're talking about. Most of the time we mask our ignorance by putting the word DevOps everywhere we can and mix it with random buzzwords like Kubernetes, serverless, CICD, team productivity, Islands of Happiness and other fancy expressions that make us sound like we know what we're doing. Occasionally, we invite guests who do know something, but we do not do that often since they might make us look incompetent. The truth is out there, and there is no way we are going to find it.
Yes, it's Darren reading this text and feeling embarrassed that Victor made me do it. Here are your hosts, Darren Pope and Viktor Farsson. When was the last time you watched a product demo? Maybe it was a 30-minute video, and you walk away from that thinking that you learned anything.

**Viktor Farcic** (2:00)
It's been a while, I guess.

**Darin Pope** (2:02)
Typically, if you could get your hands on it for five minutes, you would feel like you'd learned more, correct?

**Viktor Farcic** (2:06)
Yeah. That's why I was kind of confused trying to remember because I really rarely watch a demo. I run demos.
I want to run it myself. When I watch something, it's more like a person explaining me something rather than demo itself.

**Darin Pope** (2:23)
But now we have our new friends, our AI overlords.

**Viktor Farcic** (2:27)
Oh, it's friends. You're now in plural. I like it.

**Darin Pope** (2:30)
We have friends that can watch the video in 30 minutes, that can play in the sandbox for five minutes, except in their timelines, it's a lot faster in human time. And then come back and say, yeah, I've already tried it, it doesn't work.
How does a vendor answer to that?
Or maybe another one. You're watching a demo up on stage. Let's say it's an open source project, or at least code's available. Somebody's sitting on the audience, they've got Cloud or something running. And by the time they get to the point in the demo where there's actually been some problems, somebody's already put a PR in for what just happened in the demo.

**Viktor Farcic** (3:08)
Yeah. We denote that I hope that those demos are available in non-video format as well, just to make it easier for our friends.

**Darin Pope** (3:18)
Correct. Especially in text, because it makes it very easy.

**Viktor Farcic** (3:21)
Yeah. I have opinion that if I'm going to watch somebody, I'm going to do that. I'm not going to let Cloud watch it for me.
If I want Cloud to give me the information, it should probably go anywhere but YouTube.

**Darin Pope** (3:35)
Why are we talking about this? This is a conversation I had with a couple of people back at KCD in Austin this year. Most people were vendors I was talking to, and they were thinking, okay, how will we show the demos for these things? Because especially if it's sales, you're trying to introduce something and trying to sell something, whether you're actually trying to sell it for money or you're trying to get somebody to adopt an open source project within their company, you should go through some sort of demo, whatever that demo is.
But if a company, your target prospect, is already going down the AI route, one of their first questions is, okay, where's your CLI? Do you have an MCP server for it? And your answer is going to be, it's on the roadmap for 2029 Yeah, that's our roadmap.

**Viktor Farcic** (4:24)
The goal of everybody should be to make on every single level life of agencies easier. That's the current goal.
Whether that's MCP, whether that's CLI, whether that's skills, whether that's not blocking your website from agents, it can be many different things. But that's the current job. Just before this recording, actually, I was worried I'm not going to name the service, one of the Clouds. And I was, okay, get me all this me with Cloud. Get all the pricing. I want to see the price. I want to compare it with others. And it came back and said, blocked by Cloudflare.