Do you think e.g. students learning docker syntax at a uni is beneficial in 2026 or you think LLM-assisted programming means that Docker will become an abstraction under an abstraction and its setup will be mostly automated by LLMs? I find myself very rarely debugging or handwriting dockerfiles nowadays!

This is a strange question because you could learn Dockerfile syntax in a single night. There are only 18 directives, and the average Dockerfile uses like 6 of them. 90%+ of Dockerfiles is just "run this shell command" and "copy this file into the docker image". The only time it flirts with complexity is multi-stage Dockerfiles, but 90%+ of Dockerfiles are a single stage.

https://docs.docker.com/reference/dockerfile/

I'm gonna be real with you. No one needs to know docker syntax. Most engineers just copy and paste chunks of Dockerfiles around anyways.

Docker syntax is one of those things that just immediately falls out of my head when I close the editor. I don't care about it at all.

Even better: there are many, many tools that build OCI images without using the Docker syntax. I haven't hand-written a Dockerfile in at least six years.

LLMs have not loved the needle here in my sphere, it was already bouncing off of the zero on the gauge.

edit: this isn't to say the syntax is good or bad (though there are several questionable parts of it) but extremely simple, and concise enough that you can just look up literally any command with great ease. It's surely a large part of its success, for better or for worse.