CodeMeet Madrid: Kubernetes Escape Room – Can You Debug Your Way Out with AI?

CodeMeet Madrid: Kubernetes Escape Room – Can You Debug Your Way Out with AI?

A service is down. Pods keep restarting. The logs aren't giving you the full picture. And you have AI as your copilot. Can you find your way out?

On 29 October, we're heading to Nexthink's offices in Madrid for a hands-on CodeMeet focused on Kubernetes troubleshooting, incident response and AI-assisted debugging.

We'll start with an introductory talk from Manuel Fernández Arias, Consultant Software Engineer at Thoughtworks, exploring a question that is becoming increasingly relevant for engineers: Can we trust AI when production is on fire?

Then, we'll put those ideas into practice with Carlos Vicent and Unai Arrien, SREs at Nexthink, through an interactive Kubernetes Escape Room. Rather than simply talking about how AI can help engineers, Carlos and Unai will put it into practice. You'll face realistic incident scenarios and use logs, metrics, events, recent changes and AI to investigate what is going wrong and figure out how to get the system back on track.

The goal isn't to let AI solve everything for us. It's about understanding where AI can make incident response faster, how to use it effectively and when human judgement is still essential. [\[Register here\]](https://forms.gle/vTy426JJeimPPXyS7)

Meet the speakers

Manuel Fernández Arias — Consultant Software Engineer at Thoughtworks Manuel is a Software Engineer with more than six years of experience, currently working at Thoughtworks. He's interested in the intersection between software architecture and AI, particularly in how agents and LLMs can be integrated into real development workflows. He'll kick off the evening with “Can We Trust AI When Production Is on Fire? From Stack Overflow to AI Agents”, exploring how AI is changing incident investigation and where human judgement and safety guardrails are still essential..

Carlos Vicent — SRE at Nexthink Carlos leads reliability initiatives for more than 20 million endpoints across Nexthink's distributed platform, which includes 200+ microservices. He specialises in incident response automation and observability for cloud-native environments, and is a big Kubernetes enthusiast. He also regularly attends DevOps, SRE and observability conferences around the world. Together with Unai, he'll take us through the Kubernetes Escape Room and the different incidents we'll have to investigate.

Unai Arrien — SRE at Nexthink Unai works on the operation and improvement of resilient distributed systems at Nexthink. His experience covers automation, observability and incident response, and he particularly enjoys helping teams investigate, debug and solve complex problems from the real world. Together with Carlos, he'll guide the hands-on part of the evening, where we'll investigate incidents, follow the clues and see what happens when AI becomes part of the debugging process.

Agenda 🕡 18:30 – 18:45 \| Registration 👋 18:45 – 18:50 \| Welcome 🎤 18:55 – 19:20 \| Intro talk — Can We Trust AI When Production Is on Fire?

Manuel Fernández Arias will explore how AI is changing incident investigation, from searching Stack Overflow to working with AI agents directly from our terminals and clusters. We'll look at how to use AI as a copilot without blindly trusting its recommendations.

🧩 19:20 – 20:40 \| Kubernetes Escape Room Workshop

Carlos Vicent and Unai Arrien, SREs at Nexthink, will lead us through an interactive Kubernetes Escape Room based on realistic incident scenarios.

Together, we'll investigate what’s going wrong, follow the clues and use logs, metrics, events and AI to diagnose each incident. Along the way, Carlos and Unai will share their approach to troubleshooting and show us where AI can speed things up — and where it can lead us in the wrong direction.

🍻 20:40 – 21:30 \| Networking & closing

After surviving the Escape Room, it's time to relax, grab a drink and share the experience with the rest of the attendees.

What will we…