In this episode of Shift AI, Jared Wray, CEO and co-founder of Hyphen, joins host Boaz Ashkenazy for a wide-ranging conversation on how AI is poised to eliminate the complexity of cloud infrastructure and the DevOps role entirely.
Jared shares his unconventional career journey from growing up in a small town in Idaho, where technology barely existed, to washing dishes at 15, teaching himself programming at the local ISP, and eventually founding five startups across cloud computing, energy tech, and developer infrastructure. From bootstrapping Tier 3 (acquired by CenturyLink) to co-founding Palmetto, now one of the largest energy lenders in the nation, Jared's path has been defined by a passion for solving infrastructure problems.
The conversation dives deep into why DevOps has become painfully complex, with developers needing to glue together seven to thirteen different services just to deploy a single application across providers like AWS, Google Cloud, and Cloudflare. Jared explains how Hyphen is using AI to abstract away this complexity by asking developers only for business rules like uptime requirements and performance needs, then letting the AI determine the right architecture, deploy it, and operate it autonomously.
Boaz and Jared explore why tools like Claude Code and other coding agents still cannot handle the full deployment lifecycle, what it would look like if AI agents replaced PagerDuty by calling you during an outage with a diagnosis and recommendation, and why the future of infrastructure is an autonomous cloud where humans are decision makers and agents handle everything else. The episode closes with a forward-looking discussion on agent-only companies, the death of cloud certifications, and why Jared believes DevOps was a good idea that we ran too long.
This episode is essential listening for CTOs, platform engineers, and startup founders who want to understand how AI is moving beyond writing code to fundamentally transforming how software is deployed, operated, and scaled.
Chapters
[00:00] From Pocatello to Five Startups: Jared's Career Journey
[02:49] Building Fonz, Co-founding Palmetto, and Finding Passion in Infrastructure
[06:05] Why AI Led Jared Back to Infrastructure with Hyphen
[07:05] First Job as a Dishwasher and Breaking Into Tech
[08:46] What Is DevOps and Why Does It Exist
[10:49] Why Cloud Infrastructure Has Become So Painfully Complex
[12:36] How AI Can Apply Best Practices Without Reinventing the Wheel
[14:35] The Hyphen Developer Experience: Business Rules Over Architecture
[17:14] Why Claude Code and Coding Agents Cannot Solve Infrastructure Yet
[20:26] The Full Context Problem: Operating Across Multiple Cloud Providers
[23:07] Autonomous Cloud: When Agents Talk to Agents
[24:17] Replacing PagerDuty: AI Agents That Call You During Outages
[28:47] March Madness, Live Streaming, and Why Five Minutes Feels Like a Lifetime
[30:59] Two Words for the Future of Work: Autonomous Cloud
[33:20] Agent-Only Companies and Why Humans Will Be CEOs
[35:12] DevOps Was a Good Idea We Ran Too Long
[35:41] What Is Next for Hyphen
Connect with Jared Wray
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jaredwray/
Email: jw@hyphen.ai
Connect with Boaz Ashkenazy
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/boazashkenazy/
Email: info@shiftai.fm
