You Need AI Sysadmins Can Trust, With Cribl's Nikhil Mungel

About this episode

Cory O'Daniel and Nikhil Mungel discuss the challenges and solutions for building trustworthy AI systems for sysadmins.

What happens when a non-deterministic AI system is asked to touch production telemetry or generate changes for an SRE pipeline? The cost of being “close enough” can be lost data, downtime, or a security incident. Cribl’s Nikhil Mungel joins Cory to break down what it takes to build AI that sysadmins can actually trust. The conversation digs into harness engineering and the practical guardrails that turn probabilistic models into repeatable, verifiable outcomes. They cover why breaking work into small chunks matters, how validation and testing become the real leverage point for AI-native development, and what “code factories” mean for review, CI, and platform reliability when teams can generate a thousand PRs an hour. Platform engineers will also hear a pragmatic take on the future of the job. The focus shifts away from typing code and toward building systems for verification, simulation, and safe deployment at scale, plus clearer ways to decide what needs human scrutiny and what can ship automatically. Guest: Nikhil Mungel , Head of AI R&D at Cribl Nikhil Mungel is the Head of AI R&D at Cribl, where he's building LLM-powered systems for IT and Security data transformation…

People in this episode

Host: Cory O'Daniel

Guest: Nikhil Mungel

Topics covered

• AI in sysadmin
• trust in AI
• SRE pipeline
• harness engineering
• platform reliability
• AI-native development

Keywords

• AI
• sysadmins
• SRE
• telemetry
• platform engineering
• verification
• automation

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Cribl

Places: San Francisco

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