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AI handles incidents, engineers lose touch with their systems

sylvainkalache.com

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Re: AI handles incidents, engineers lose touch with their systems

#41

Post by alex_smart »

throw839948499 wrote: post #17
bob1029 wrote: post #6

A 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…

Because simplicity is hard and often the result of careful thought. Anybody can keep piling pile of shit on top of pile of shit which is why that sort of code is so common in our industry.

Re: AI handles incidents, engineers lose touch with their systems

#42

Post by DiggyJohnson »

mawadev wrote: post #25
Root_Denied wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm seeing this happen in the security space right now. Someone on my team I was helping train and bring along is all of sudden regressing in their understanding of the issues we're working on, and instead focusing on AI tool outputs to do their job for them.

I can share a weird story: Usually, I take my time to understand each keyword of the code I'm looking at, especially if it is new to me, like terraform. I work in a team/with one architect, who only did the DevOps/Infra stuff for the past years and I had the expectation he knows what he is doing and talking about. At around 2 weeks, I noticed how his knowledge has severe gaps and how he takes things at face value or…

You captured this phenomenon very well in this comment. Appreciate you sharing it because it’s hard to describe exactly what makes this sort of behavior so bizarre.

Re: AI handles incidents, engineers lose touch with their systems

#43

Post by bob1029 »

PunchyHamster wrote: post #20
bob1029 wrote: post #6

A 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

I think there are many cases where it was the tech workers themselves who argued for isolation from the customer so that they may focus harder on whatever tasks. I used to be one of these workers. I argued very hard for it. I regret that today.

On the surface it seems rational, but it quickly turns into a system of perverse incentives because now the development team must maintain an illusion that they are constantly overwhelmed with tasks and could never hope to spare a microsecond to assist the customer. This misalignment is how you wind up building your own web frameworks and databases from scratch. It turns into a self serving monster that eventually dominates the entire business. From the perspective of the business, many of these development teams look like they're behind some modern day iron curtain.

Re: AI handles incidents, engineers lose touch with their systems

#44

Post by throw839948499 »

shakna wrote: post #21
throw839948499 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Claude regular spits out six helper functions instead of... A twenty line for loop. It overengineers most things. Overabstracting, deduplicating things that don't need to be. Building metaclasses because it saw a single orchestrator in the whole codebase. If it is a better engineer than you... You need practice.

I am former java enterprise dev, so yes I often code this way. Unit testing, decomposition... Some projects CI refuse to merge commits with 20 line loop and duplicated code...

But that is not a point. Claude can code tight compact loops, it just needs to be instructed to do so! If it does "enterprise code", it means it had no instructions about code style.

If your documentation, spec, agent.md does not have proper guidance on coding style... yet another red flag!

Re: AI handles incidents, engineers lose touch with their systems

#45

Post by throw839948499 »

Sharlin wrote: post #23
throw839948499 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

So after 30 years of outsourcing to the bottom 10%, you think Claude is better than the bottom 90% even though it’s so stupid that it doesn’t even know it should ask for advice or more information when it’s stuck?

It just follows instructions you give it.

Some asian devs will go for weeks without asking for help, all while giving amazing fake status reports. Loosing face etc...

Re: AI handles incidents, engineers lose touch with their systems

#46

Post by 2wrist »

mawadev wrote: post #25
Root_Denied wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm seeing this happen in the security space right now. Someone on my team I was helping train and bring along is all of sudden regressing in their understanding of the issues we're working on, and instead focusing on AI tool outputs to do their job for them.

I can share a weird story: Usually, I take my time to understand each keyword of the code I'm looking at, especially if it is new to me, like terraform. I work in a team/with one architect, who only did the DevOps/Infra stuff for the past years and I had the expectation he knows what he is doing and talking about. At around 2 weeks, I noticed how his knowledge has severe gaps and how he takes things at face value or…

Great comment.

At my place, this is what they want. They want people to smash through things as fast as possible. They don’t want people to sit and craft a solution which takes in to account the whole. They are choosing tools which are low code, and use llm’s to produce what they need. as they say “this is the way things are going”.

Re: AI handles incidents, engineers lose touch with their systems

#47

Post by throw839948499 »

SyneRyder wrote: post #33
throw839948499 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

While I actually agree with you (though, outsourcing to lowest bidder would account for much of what you're seeing with humans), I just saw Bug Hunt Bench scores that gave me some pause: https://x.com/PawelHuryn/status/2095982259761475945 https://bughunt.productcompass.pm/?preset=all Claude Opus 4.8 ranks near last on this Bug Hunt benchmark, and missed 96% of the deliberately introduced bugs. If you're a developer w…

Still, basic debuging and trouble shooting is where LLM generally shine. Any model can bisect git history and isolate newly introduced bug.

If model can not automatically reproduce bug, while human manually can... you got a problem in CI.

> Luna Max performing better than Fable 5.1 High

Perhaps you are reading too many benchmarks.

Edit for answer :

I agree Luna is great cheap model.

But if Fable was hitting security limits, yet was still included in benchmarks...

What flies better? Elephant or paper plane. You can make objective benchmark about that. But not much value for logistics company

Re: AI handles incidents, engineers lose touch with their systems

#48

Post by touisteur »

ChiMan wrote: post #36

This is why the paradigm for AI use should not be automation but rather the cyborg. Under automation, people are less active and engaged and become mere operators of automated processes. They become slaves of the machines. Under the cyborg model, they arrange the machines in a way to make people masters of a universe that includes the machines helping them be that.

For more in this vein, look up "Automation should be like Iron Man, not like Ultron". Sad to see so many people let go of their agency.

Re: AI handles incidents, engineers lose touch with their systems

#49

Post by setopt »

ulrikrasmussen wrote: post #12
bob1029 wrote: post #6

A 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.

That sounds somewhat applicable to many tools. Like Vim/Emacs, for example. Or computers and smart phones in general.

Re: AI handles incidents, engineers lose touch with their systems

#50

Post by pvtmert »

When someone else -whether AI agent or a human- solves the recurring minor problems for you, those problems become non-issue, get swept under the rug, just to accumulate more dust.

One day, those may become bigger as they are forgotten, causing havoc. The standard root-cause-analysis depending on systems having certain retention period, which may be expired at that time.

It is important to get real hold of one's systems from end-to-end aspect, which holds true for both AI and human operators...

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