Isn't there anywhere to "go" from here? In the last decades, introducing new high level abstractions on top of existing paradigms naturally had everyone move up the ladder and work at the next higher level, why should this be different these days? Do we think AI will reach the top of the abstraction ceiling, so there's no where to go from here?
AI handles incidents, engineers lose touch with their systems
11–20 of 376 posts
Re: AI handles incidents, engineers lose touch with their systems
#12A natural evolution of engineers losing touch with the customers and users. I'm noticing some of the concern play out regarding AI weakening the capabilities of software people. I gave the team an exact solution on a silver platter and they still failed to identify how to go about it after 3 days slamming it into Claude. The resolution is literally 1 line of code that could be arrived at in about 30 minutes of patien…
I think LLMs have some of the same risks and benefits of stimulant drugs. They can make you more productive if used effectively as a tool, but they can also delude you into thinking you are better than you are and create a dependence such that you aren't just less productive without the LLM/drug, you fail to be productive at all because you don't know how to function without it.
Re: AI handles incidents, engineers lose touch with their systems
#13"THIS IS NOT A DRILL"
Re: AI handles incidents, engineers lose touch with their systems
#14Anyone who's worked in tech in a large company will probably have experienced having an ops team who use RPA tools to do repetitive tasks that tech teams get the blame for when things break. AI will make this so much worse. Things will break, everyone will assume 'tech knows the system', but really it's a new process outside of the tech teams that someone vibe coded but got it wrong.
Audit trails, logs, and tight data governance where things can only be accessed with proper roles is the only possible solution.
If an RPA team ever gets direct access to a production database in your company, look for a new job.
Re: AI handles incidents, engineers lose touch with their systems
#15Isn't there anywhere to "go" from here? In the last decades, introducing new high level abstractions on top of existing paradigms naturally had everyone move up the ladder and work at the next higher level, why should this be different these days? Do we think AI will reach the top of the abstraction ceiling, so there's no where to go from here?
That’s the big question for sure
Re: AI handles incidents, engineers lose touch with their systems
#16We have been running Agents on infrastructure and letting to create resources, scale up and down, security scans etc.
I agree with premise of thr blog. The question i have been asking internal does knowing your system really matter if you can recreate it in minutes.
We recently had a situation, where in with our internal platform and claude we recreated everything in minutes.
Management in the end cares about the outcome and not how the meat is made.
Re: AI handles incidents, engineers lose touch with their systems
#17A natural evolution of engineers losing touch with the customers and users. I'm noticing some of the concern play out regarding AI weakening the capabilities of software people. I gave the team an exact solution on a silver platter and they still failed to identify how to go about it after 3 days slamming it into Claude. The resolution is literally 1 line of code that could be arrived at in about 30 minutes of patien…
If the solution is so simple, why claude did not found it? At this point we can assume, it is better than 90% of engineers (including me).
After three decades of outsourcing to lowest bidder, I do not buy that humans are somehow better!
> patient, old school troubleshooting
I usually see similar arguments around systems with major red flags (no docs, poor CI, decade ago no CVS...). And engineers with private stash of workarounds for job security!
Claude does not do anything special.
Or perhaps claude was misconfigured, it had no access to relevant part of system, and it tryied to work within its limitation. Often it means decompiling binaries in desperate loop...
Re: AI handles incidents, engineers lose touch with their systems
#18If capability increase continues as it has, then an incident that cannot be resolved by AI will stump humans no matter the practice. I like the plane example from the article,but I think in reality it will be like code. 1.5 years ago engineers would routinely say that they still write code by hand here or there to keep their skills sharp, and that's just not something you hear much if at all. If an SRE is faced with…
> If capability increase continues as it has, then an incident that cannot be resolved by AI will stump humans no matter the practice.
I disagree with this. Whatever the AI produces must be embodied in some kind of information system. The moment the output is on disk, it's fish in a barrel for any competent operator.
I've worked in environments that are beyond the pale with regard to complexity. It will take AI another 10 years to product something as complicated and coherent as a semiconductor manufacturing operating system, which is clearly feasible for humans to manage today.
Re: AI handles incidents, engineers lose touch with their systems
#19Anyone who's worked in tech in a large company will probably have experienced having an ops team who use RPA tools to do repetitive tasks that tech teams get the blame for when things break. AI will make this so much worse. Things will break, everyone will assume 'tech knows the system', but really it's a new process outside of the tech teams that someone vibe coded but got it wrong. Audit trails, logs, and tight dat…
> Robotic process automation is a type of business process automation that automates tasks within business and IT processes using scripts that mimic human interaction with application user interfaces.
For anyone else wondering what RPA means. Never heard that abbreviation before.
Re: AI handles incidents, engineers lose touch with their systems
#20A natural evolution of engineers losing touch with the customers and users. I'm noticing some of the concern play out regarding AI weakening the capabilities of software people. I gave the team an exact solution on a silver platter and they still failed to identify how to go about it after 3 days slamming it into Claude. The resolution is literally 1 line of code that could be arrived at in about 30 minutes of patien…
I don't think it's engineers, it's the rest of the org insulating the tech workers from every side of the business