Stakpak Vs Coding Agents
Overview
While coding agents are impressive at writing code, they often struggle in DevOps/Ops work, Stakpak was designed from the ground up for DevOps & Operations.
Why We Built Stakpak?
We want infrastructure to be autonomous and self-driving. So we as engineers could focus on what matters the most (and what we enjoy the most) coding... building things.
As illustrated bellow, a Stakpak user today will spend most of their session time on non-coding related tasks. Now imagine most (if not all) of that going away!
We're building an intelligence you can rely on to take away the DevOps pains in your workflow, so you could spend more time coding.
This is in contrast to coding agents, MCP tools, and models which try maximize the number of lines of code you ship every day.
What Makes Stakpak Different?
First, let's dig into the difference between Coding Tasks and DevOps Tasks:
Coding Tasks
DevOps Tasks
Feedback loop
fast
slow
Users’ knowledge
high
< 3% of devs do this full-time*
Syntax/Language
few popular
many domain specific
Frequency of schema/knowledge change
low
high
Context
mostly local
mostly remote
*Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2024
Coding tasks and DevOps tasks are different. Coding tasks involve fast feedback loops, widely adopted languages, and the fact that most developers already are quite experienced in the language they're using. In contrast, DevOps tasks often take longer to get feedback, involve remote systems, and require handling many domain-specific languages, and tools. Only a small fraction of people work on these tasks full-time, and the landscape changes frequently as tools and APIs evolve. These differences make DevOps tasks more complex, less predictable, and harder to support with LLM tools originally designed for coding.
Rule Books: Organizational Intelligence
Rule Books are how you teach Stakpak agents to follow your way of doing things. Think of them as markdown-based SOPs (standard operating procedures), whether it’s how to deploy to production, upgrade infrastructure, or tag resources correctly. Stakpak uses Rule Books to make decisions that align with your team’s standards, not just generic best practices.
Why does it matter?
Coding agents follow generic best practices. Stakpak follows your practices.
Coding Agents
Generic advice like "follow best practices for deployment," but getting your entire organization to actually follow the same procedures is nearly impossible without org-wide shared rules
Stakpak:
Executes your exact procedure step-by-step, accounting for variations that happen in real-life ops
Memory Blocks: Persistent Operational Knowledge
Memory Blocks are reusable pieces of knowledge that your agent learns during sessions.
As you interact with the agent, it automatically extracts useful information like commands, configs, environment details, or error fixes and stores them as memory blocks for future use.
Why does it matter?
Because operational knowledge shouldn’t disappear after a session. Every command, fix, or config you share becomes part of a growing knowledge base that’s always available. Over time, the agent understands your environment better, responds with more context, and helps you solve problems faster without repeating yourself.
Coding Agents
Knowledge isn't shared across team members, and generic memory systems can't extract infrastructure-specific patterns
Stakpak:
Builds organizational knowledge over time with
/memorizecommand
Shell Mode: Interactive Operations
Shell Mode is Stakpak’s built-in terminal designed to handle interactive shell commands that require real-time user input, such as password prompts or confirmations. It allows you to run commands that pause for user decisions or credentials.
Why does it matter?
Many operational tasks need interactive prompts
Coding Agents
Can only suggest commands, can't execute interactive ones
Stakpak:
Executes interactive commands with secure credential handling
Async Background Tasks: Non-Blocking Operations
Stakpak supports async background tasks so your agent can run long operations like provisioning infrastructure or port-forwarding into Kubernetes clusters without blocking your workflow.
These tasks execute in parallel, allowing the agent to stay responsive and handle multiple requests at once.
Why does it matter?
Infrastructure operations often take minutes or hours
Coding Agents
One response at a time, no background execution, port-forwarding on watching logs stall the main thread
Stakpak:
Runs multiple long-running tasks in parallel with a non-blocking task manager
Agent Sessions: Operational Audit Trail
Review and audit your past agent sessions to understand exactly what your agent did and why.
Each session includes:
Full conversation history
Key checkpoints and decisions
Actions taken and their results
Why does it matter?
Easier debugging and operational transparency
Coding Agents
Short-term chat history
Stakpak:
Transparent audit trail with shareable Agent Sessions
Warden: Production Guardrails
Warden acts as a deterministic policy enforcer for every agent action. It inspects, validates, and blocks any destructive or unauthorized operations before they reach your environment.
Why does it matter?
It prevents destructive operations in production environments
Coding Agents
They have basic command blacklisting but in DevOps and operations, agents run hundreds of tools and custom scripts. It's impossible to blacklist every destructive pattern across Terraform, kubectl, AWS CLI, Docker, and other custom automation
Stakpak:
Built-in safety net with
stakpak warden, technology agnostic, and blocks all commands with API side-effects by default
Dynamic Secret Redaction: Production Safe Security
Stakpak agent can interact with secrets like API keys and tokens without ever seeing their actual values. Secrets are redacted at runtime and never exposed in logs or memory.
Why does it matter?
Protects sensitive data from exposure in logs and conversations
Coding Agents
It will accidentally expose secrets.
Stakpak:
Never sees or logs actual secret values as it supports the entire GitLeaks library, plus additional patterns it can safely redact, compare, and write 200+ secret types in real-time
Design Choices
Here are tradeoffs we make when building Stakpak to optimize for DevOps
Good generalist coder, but the BEST at DevOps Stakpak runs Claude Sonnet 4, so it's really good at generic coding task, this is needed for a variety of DevOps related tasks (debugging code, configuring secrets properly, or finding an entry point for containerization). However we optimize everything around the model for day-to-day DevOps tasks, for instance our context management allows the agent to handle long-horizon tasks spanning +100 steps without need for state compaction which reduces accuracy.
Usable security Handling secrets and sensitive data is inevitable in production. We developed the most secure file editing, and MCP tools implementation in any coding agent + state of the art deterministic guardrails specifically designed for DevOps. We put a lot of effort into making security transparent for developers.
Terminal native You should be able to drop into a Stakpak shell anywhere, support remote SSH operations natively.
Run in the user's environment Stakpak is designed to run in your own terminal, server, and CI/CD. This allows you to use the agent effectively without sharing your credentials. It operates within your existing SDLC.
Opinionated models Our R&D shows that optimizing for a specific LLM (or ensemble of them) takes time, giving users the ability to switch models without proper evaluation produces subpar performance. We have internal evaluations and optimization pipelines to make sure we're shipping the best ensemble of models + system prompts + Rule Books for a given task, and it all works out of the box.
TLDR
Choose Stakpak When You Need:
To run operations safely in live environments
Consistency and compliance by design
Long-running, asynchronous tasks without blocking
Organizational knowledge that grows over time
Transparent audit trails for debugging and accountability
Built-in security for secrets and production guardrails
Choose Coding Agents When You Need:
Help writing or explaining code
Quick answers to programming questions
Generating snippets, algorithms, or boilerplate
Learning new frameworks, libraries, or languages
Coding agents help you write code. Stakpak helps you run production operations.
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