{"id":389229,"date":"2026-04-09T04:44:12","date_gmt":"2026-04-09T04:44:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/389229\/"},"modified":"2026-04-09T04:44:12","modified_gmt":"2026-04-09T04:44:12","slug":"rebrand-automation-as-zero-token-architecture-to-master-ai-the-register","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/389229\/","title":{"rendered":"Rebrand automation as ‘zero-token architecture’ to master AI \u2022 The Register"},"content":{"rendered":"

As businesses drink the agentic AI Kool-Aid and go looking for productivity enhancements, IT professionals can deliver by rebranding their existing automations as \u201czero-token architecture,\u201d according to Kelsey Hightower, a former Google distinguished engineer and a notable early promoter of Kubernetes.<\/p>\n

Speaking at Nutanix\u2019s .NEXT conference in Chicago on Wednesday, Hightower said he\u2019s spoken to IT professionals who say they intend to use agentic AI to automatically handle requests for new passwords by parsing users\u2019 requests typed into Slack messages.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe agent will burn $2 trillion worth of tokens and call an API,\u201d he joked. He also shared a four-letter acronym he recommends as an alternative: B-A-S-H, for the Bash command line tool which he pointed out can use the data transfer tool cURL<\/a> to automate password resets.<\/p>\n

Hightower suggested describing the combination of Bash and cURL as \u201cthe zero-token architecture,\u201d because many organizations are starting to introduce token consumption quotas to control their AI bills.<\/p>\n

He also recommended continuing to use automation tools like Puppet, Ansible, and Chef, and techniques like storing configuration files in etc\/cron.d, but rebranding them.<\/p>\n

\u201cJust rename that to etc\/agent.d, and you\u2019ll have all these agents doing all these automatic things using the zero-token architecture,\u201d he suggested.<\/p>\n

On a more serious note, Hightower suggested cheeky rebranding can help IT pros to keep their jobs as AI enables more, and more sophisticated, automations \u2013 if they first develop deep technical skills.<\/p>\n

To show how, he said some careers build 20 years of work on one year of learning.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey learn how to install Linux, and make no progress after that, or learn how to manage the switches and made no progress after that,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Hightower thinks IT professionals need to go deeper and develop an understanding of technology platform fundamentals \u2013 so-called \u201chard skills.\u201d But he also thinks soft skills are increasingly important, because the aim of AI and other automation tools is to reduce reliance on hard skills by learning from IT professionals\u2019 experience.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe train the machines,\u201d he said. \u201cIt’s your real-life experiences, every bug you fix, everything you share with other people on GitHub, all of that became the training data.\u201d<\/p>\n

Automation can\u2019t replace soft skills like intuition, expressing a style, or sharing an opinion based on human experience.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou know that piece of software is going to crash in the middle of the night, because that’s when the backups run,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

\u201cI guarantee you in 10 years, hopefully most of you will still be here,\u201d Hightower added. \u201cMaybe your job will be slightly different. But I guarantee you those that understand the fundamentals will be the most creative among us,\u201d he said. \u201cThe people who know the underlying parts of the stack, those are the people who create the new programming languages, they create the new abstractions, because they understand the details below.\u201d<\/p>\n

And their soft skills will remain important too, to help IT pros do clever things like knowing when to deploy a zero-token architecture. \u00ae<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"As businesses drink the agentic AI Kool-Aid and go looking for productivity enhancements, IT professionals can deliver by…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":389230,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[220,218,219,61,60,80],"class_list":{"0":"post-389229","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-ie","12":"tag-ireland","13":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/389229","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=389229"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/389229\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/389230"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=389229"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=389229"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=389229"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}