A senior K8s engineer I work with audits manifests faster than I read them. He's seen so many patterns that "missing readinessProbe on a Deployment that takes 45 seconds to start" jumps off the page. Most of us don't have that pattern library memorized — and increasingly, we don't need to. AI assistants have read more Kubernetes manifests than any human ever will.
The catch: a generic "review this YAML" prompt produces generic noise. You need to direct the model toward the categories of issues that actually matter in your environment.
The two mistakes everyone makes
Mistake 1: Asking for "a security review." You'll get a bullet list of every possible concern, ranked alphabetically, with no signal about which matter. You'll skim, dismiss, and learn nothing.
Mistake 2: Pasting one manifest. Real Kubernetes problems live in the interaction between resources — a Deployment's readiness probe and a Service's selector, a NetworkPolicy and the actual app traffic. One YAML in isolation hides most of the bugs.
