AI handles incidents, engineers lose touch with their systems • Hacker News Board

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

#71

Post by bbmatryoshka » Sat, Sep 05, 2026, 10:08 AM UTC

touisteur wrote: post #48

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.

without Iron Man's plot armor, Ultron would have won

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

#72

Post by raverbashing » Sat, Sep 05, 2026, 10:08 AM UTC

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.

100%

It is my pet peeve with Claude and why I don't prefer it for most stuff

(also the comment spam - but that's a all of them in a way or another)

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

#73

Post by simianwords » Sat, Sep 05, 2026, 10:09 AM UTC

Prediction: this won’t happen. The abstraction will be good enough and people will need to know only as much as they need to know- things will stabilise at the equilibrium.

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

#74

Post by mitxela » Sat, Sep 05, 2026, 10:09 AM UTC

Root_Denied wrote: post #8

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'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.

In my mind, this, not copyright or water use, is the best reason to boycott AI. It'll make you incompetent.

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

#75

Post by mitxela » Sat, Sep 05, 2026, 10:10 AM UTC

ffsm8 wrote: post #70

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…

Sincerely , I think you're blaming the AI incorrectly there. You just got incompetents on your payroll.

incompetent people, surely?

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

#76

Post by mitxela » Sat, Sep 05, 2026, 10:11 AM UTC

Sharlin wrote: post #38

danielbln wrote: post #2

If 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…

Like the fact that software "engineering" is mostly nothing like real engineering (and it’s further regressing now due to LLM coding!), the general lack of drilling is again one of the things that make software-related stuff look really naive and amateurish from the perspective of those dealing with the real world. Imagine if the military, police, fire service, and so on did not drill and rehearse incident response?

Netflix's chaos monkey was this, in a way.

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

#77

Post by wegwerf17377382 » Sat, Sep 05, 2026, 10:12 AM UTC

ffsm8 wrote: post #70

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…

Sincerely , I think you're blaming the AI incorrectly there. You just got incompetents on your payroll.

So how do you build competence in a world where AI is preached to be the most reasonable way to solve problems because it's supposed to be faster than humans?

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

#78

Post by Muromec » Sat, Sep 05, 2026, 10:13 AM UTC

krtkush wrote: post #9

I find the use of AI like quicksand. The more I use it, the more I have to rely on it to make changes/ fix things in the same system. In the end, I come out feeling empty; no intuitive knowledge of the system "I" built or fixed. Code review is important but it does not replace the mental model I am able to build when I do all the steps of software development manually without AI.

No worries, at some point your hit the wall with it and the reality will force you to look at the code. It won't be nice, but until that point delulu land is sustainable enough to fall forward

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

#79

Post by themgt » Sat, Sep 05, 2026, 10:13 AM UTC

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 gave the team an exact solution on a silver platter and they still failed to identify how to go about it

I think what's happening is ... poorly aligned and led engineers [in] this ego inflation feedback loop where they are completely detached from reality

A story about a team of humans with some very human problems.

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

#80

Post by vividfrier » Sat, Sep 05, 2026, 10:13 AM UTC

krtkush wrote: post #9

I find the use of AI like quicksand. The more I use it, the more I have to rely on it to make changes/ fix things in the same system. In the end, I come out feeling empty; no intuitive knowledge of the system "I" built or fixed. Code review is important but it does not replace the mental model I am able to build when I do all the steps of software development manually without AI.

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