"Middle devs take care of incidents, senior devs lose touch with their systems"
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AI handles incidents, engineers lose touch with their systems
101–110 of 374 posts
Re: AI handles incidents, engineers lose touch with their systems
#102I see aviation sentiment raised from time to time. In aviation failure is catastrophic, and systems you operate do not change on the fly (pun intended).
You can probably drill SREs that way but you are only teaching them how to _react_ efficiently, not how to _fix_ unique unicorn root causes of these failures. Aviation analogy would be an airplane engineer that tries to drill himself for in-flight engine failures AND engine debugging / engine redesign both at the same time.
It never made sense in software engineering, and never will. Minute spent on drills is a minute better spent on reworking codebase to reduce changes of future incidents. This post is very SRE centric.
Re: AI handles incidents, engineers lose touch with their systems
#103This article leads up to a hypothesis presented without evidence.
Yes, it's clear that if AI agents handle routine issues then only the most complex issues will be handled by humans. In no way does it follow that humans will be less prepared to handle those incidents than they are now; by definition, this class of problems have no rote solutions. Each issue of this type already requires deep system knowledge to remediate, and still will. Software is not aviation.
What we are seeing here is an instance of the more general trend where experts are still required to operate complex systems, but AI is destroying the career path that creates those experts. That's what we should be worrying about, not that people are going to be spending less time rebooting boxes. This isn't something you can fix with a "simulator."
Re: AI handles incidents, engineers lose touch with their systems
#104Isn'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?
This isn't abstraction though. Outsourcing is a better term.
If things continue moving up that latter, you will see that your agent/agency will pass the buck too. But there should always be some last turtle. Maybe that turtle will be the human that thought he was climbing the latter, who knows.
Re: AI handles incidents, engineers lose touch with their systems
#105A 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've felt that AI can figure out and fix 90% issues, but it rarely does minimal, non invasive fixes. That still requires manual effort. But going from a broad to minimal fix is still a different skillset from actual debugging, so in the the end it does lead to skill atrophy.
Re: AI handles incidents, engineers lose touch with their systems
#106A 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.
I saw this the past year - new employees would put problems into Claude first instead of debugging. A year back I was debug manually first, now I do the same.
The speed AI debugs at is incredible and yes, we lose touch the more we use it like any manager feet up barking orders to their underlings to get things done.
Re: AI handles incidents, engineers lose touch with their systems
#107If 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 you are in a situation where you dont know what happened when something goes wrong, the business incentives will not accept “its too complex” as an answer.
Firms aren’t just selling products, they are selling reliability and taking on liability.
Re: AI handles incidents, engineers lose touch with their systems
#108A 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…
It's the uncanny valley of AI. It's still not quite good enough yet that you can trust it blindly on a big codebase, so you still have to read and understand everything - which is often harder than just writing it up yourself. EDIT: don’t get me wrong. I still think AI is incredibly useful for a lot of tasks! But when implementing an architecturally hairy thing, I find it less stressful and equally quick to jump down…
Pretty much, The one thing I use it for is as a sanity check, pretty much "Look at , point out issues you see, summarise them tersely" and it'll spot stuff a code review by a human might have spotted (in the mythical land where people actually do code reviews properly and don't just flag a spelling mistake to "show they looked at it").
Beyond that I don't trust it at all and I still write all my code the meat sack way.
Trust is earned not given and it hasn't earned it yet.
Re: AI handles incidents, engineers lose touch with their systems
#109This article leads up to a hypothesis presented without evidence. Yes, it's clear that if AI agents handle routine issues then only the most complex issues will be handled by humans. In no way does it follow that humans will be less prepared to handle those incidents than they are now; by definition, this class of problems have no rote solutions. Each issue of this type already requires deep system knowledge to remed…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ironies_of_Automation
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/000510...
The article is based on evidence, and states it clearly in the body.
Re: AI handles incidents, engineers lose touch with their systems
#110I am exceedingly tired of poor metaphors that are popping up since AI has taken over writing. No, operating software is not like operating a plane. Not at all in fact. The people operating the software and resolving incidents are the same people who created the software in the first place, and continue to work on it day to day. Pilots have not and don't.
I'm not sure if I agree with the plane analogy either. Aren't planes supposed to have exceptionally stable hardware and software platform? Does that not significantly reduce failure modes? Most production software by comparison is constantly evolving. Unless you design very simple or basic training examples, most of it's going to be out of date soon.