ChatOps as a 'movement'/philosophy is especially weird to me. Like, when you've done your homework properly and your production deployment system is automated

ChatOps as a 'movement'/philosophy is especially weird to me. Like, when you've done your homework properly and your production deployment system is automated, ACLd, auditable, programmable, well documented and reliable then adding something like an IRC/Slack bot to it is trivial to the point of being mundane. It ends up just being another trivial integration, another tool/frontend, and more of a quality of life improvement or something cutesy than something revolutionary. When you haven't done your homework and your system is a mess, then yeah, integrating with IRC/Slack is a journey, requires you to use some superstar ChatOps tool from GitHub, requires you to spend weeks integrating your five different cloud providers into it, and you end up spending so much time on this that you have to turn it into a philosophy to justify the effort. But maybe, just maybe, you should focus on other things first. And maybe you shouldn't end up centralizing all of your deployment workflow on a third-party chat app.