X World 2026
25-26 AUGUST • NAARM | MELBOURNE
Stop Clicking and Start Committing: A Pull-Request Workflow for Device Management
Device management is still mostly ClickOps. Config in a GUI, changes made by hand, no audit trail, no rollback, no way to answer "who changed this and why." The case for GitOps, version control, pull request review, and a single source of truth, has been clear for years. What's changed is the urgency. AI is going to fundamentally change how devices are managed. Not eventually, it's already happening. The ergonomic barrier that made config-as-code feel like homework, knowing the schema, writing the YAML, getting the scoping right, is gone. AI coding agents can already turn a sentence of intent into a pull request against your MDM configuration. Teams that have GitOps discipline are positioned to move as each new capability lands. Teams with config in a GUI are going to be doing a migration while everyone else is already running. This session covers why GitOps is the prerequisite for AI-accelerated device management, what that workflow looks like in practice, and what the job looks like when the authoring is handled and the review is what's left. Attendees will leave with a concrete path from ClickOps to a workflow that's ready for what's already here.
About the presenter
Kitzy is a Customer Solutions Architect at Fleet and co-founder of the Mac Admins Slack. They bring over 15 years of device management experience, including nearly a decade building the discipline at Fastly and prior work as a Professional Services Engineer at Jamf.
Interview
We asked Kitzy a few questions about where Apple's heading and what they're working on.
What are you most excited about in Apple's upcoming OS releases?
Declarative Device Management finally becoming the actual standard with OS 27, not just the direction everyone's been nodding along to since 2017. Package Uninstall closing the loop I've been complaining about for years: if DDM installed it, DDM should be able to remove it too.
Is there new hardware you're hoping Apple ships?
Honestly, it's been about a decade since I've been genuinely excited about hardware. I think we've hit a point where everything is just a slightly faster version of what came before it. I wanted to be excited about the Vision Pro, but it pretty quickly fell flat for me. I'd love for Apple to ship something that changes my mind, but I'm not holding my breath.
The rise of AI: excited, scared, intrigued, or something else?
AI is like any powerful tool: the technology itself was never the deciding factor. Who gets to use it, and for what, is. I get genuinely excited about the friction it removes and who it makes newly capable, and I stay clear-eyed about the environmental cost and how much economic and political power it's consolidating in very few hands. I think this is industrial-revolution-scale disruption, not dot-com-scale hype, and refusing to engage doesn't protect you from it. It just means you don't get a say in what it becomes.
What's the best thing you've built that nobody's heard of?
IconGrabber, a small Swift CLI tool that extracts high-quality icons straight out of macOS apps. It's the kind of unglamorous utility that quietly makes self-service portals and app catalogs look like someone cared, and almost nobody outside the people scripting those workflows has ever run into it.
What do you wish you'd known when you started building admin tools for Apple platforms?
That you don't need permission to start. I spent a long time assuming someone more qualified would build the tool I needed, and eventually I just built it instead. And: ship it early. The Mac admin community will make your work better faster than you'll manage alone.
"You should come to my talk if…"
…you're still managing your devices by clicking around a GUI and want to see what changes when your MDM config lives in a pull request instead.
