How a Startup CTO Replaced 6 DevOps Tools with One ShellBot

A LinkedIn post from a startup CTO sparked a heated debate in the engineering community. The claim? Their 12-person team replaced six separate DevOps tools with ShellBot — and their velocity doubled.

The Before

The startup’s DevOps stack looked like many others:

• Terraform for infrastructure provisioning
• Ansible for configuration management
• Jenkins for CI/CD
• Datadog for monitoring
• PagerDuty for alerting
• Confluence for runbooks

Each tool had its own configuration language, its own dashboard, and its own learning curve. Onboarding a new engineer meant weeks of tool training.

The After

With ShellBot, the team consolidated their workflows into natural language conversations:

• “Provision a staging environment identical to production” replaced 200 lines of Terraform
• “Deploy the latest main branch to staging and run the smoke tests” replaced a Jenkins pipeline
• “What’s causing the latency spike on the API server?” replaced a Datadog investigation

The Numbers

After three months with ShellBot:

• Deployment frequency: 3x per week → 4x per day
• Mean time to recovery: 45 minutes → 8 minutes
• Onboarding time for DevOps tasks: 3 weeks → 2 days

The Debate

Not everyone agreed. Some commenters argued that abstracting away infrastructure knowledge was dangerous. Others pointed out that ShellBot doesn’t replace understanding — it lowers the barrier to action.

The CTO’s response was measured: “We didn’t throw away our knowledge. We stopped wasting it on repetitive tasks. Our engineers still understand what’s happening. They just don’t have to type it out every time.”

ShellDone, indeed.