With the rise of generative AI, everyone’s become obsessed with crafting the perfect prompts - writing guides, sharing templates, and even selling courses on how to talk to AI. But here’s an interesting observation: while we’re all getting better at communicating with AI, we’re still surprisingly bad at asking other humans for help. The contrast between these carefully crafted AI prompts and our casual requests to colleagues is striking, especially in technical environments.

The DevOps Communication Challenge

Working in DevOps, I see this play out daily. Here’s what typically lands in our Slack channels:

“Pipeline deployment failed in prod. Anyone around to help?”

Or my personal favorite: “The monitoring dashboard is red. Can someone take a look?”

In a DevOps world where minutes count and system reliability is everything, these vague requests create real problems. You end up with three people investigating the same issue, critical details surfacing way too late, and incidents taking twice as long to resolve as they should.

Better Ways to Ask for Help

Here’s what I’ve learned about making help requests that actually get results:

  1. Set the Scene Properly Instead of “The pipeline’s broken,” try “The main deployment pipeline is failing at the integration tests stage, error logs show connection timeouts to the test DB.”

  2. Target the Right People Don’t blast the whole DevOps channel if you know who owns the component. Be specific: “Need input from someone on the infrastructure team who’s familiar with our AWS auto-scaling setup.”

  3. Show You’ve Done Your Part Nothing gets help faster than showing you’ve already tried to solve it: “I’ve checked CloudWatch logs, confirmed IAM permissions, and rolled back the latest config change. Still seeing the errors below…”

  4. Be Clear About What You Need Rather than “How do I fix this?” try “Looking for suggestions on additional monitoring metrics to help identify what’s triggering these intermittent failures.”

Making It Work

It’s kind of ironic - all this focus on AI communication has highlighted how we could be doing better with human communication. The same things that make AI prompts effective - clarity, context, and specific details - are exactly what we need when asking colleagues for help.

Next time you’re about to ping your team with a quick “anyone seen this before?” message, take a moment to craft something more useful. In a world where we’re teaching machines to understand us better, we might as well apply those same principles to how we work with each other.