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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

#141

Post by defrost »

dist-epoch wrote: post #137
wegwerf17377382 wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

That's like asking "how do you build competence in plowing a field with a horse in a world of tractors"

Pretty straight forward really, you keep using horses in parallel: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-10-18/heavy-horsemen-keep-f...

That's the other side of the country, but it's how it's done over here also.

Still pull the old plough varieties, still practice shed blacksmithing, etc - even while developing and using autonomous Ag-Bot tractors for spraying, etc.

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

#142

Post by techpression »

huurtehoog wrote: post #131
setopt wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Yeah, like caffeine is to meth

Thank you for this, the hand waving comparisons of AI and anything else is getting out of hand on HN. Your ”like caffeine is to meth” is one of the more succinct and describing sentences I’ve seen describe the difference.

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

#143

Post by huurtehoog »

jtfrench wrote: post #5

The more code writes autonomously, the less intuition the human owners have about that code. Loss of intuition is a seed of technical debt that grows with time. Over a long enough horizon, it can make looking at your own codebase feel like the first day on the job (sometimes at a company you started). Luckily, there are ways to mitigate this and essentially translate those human intuition of how the codebase “should”…

I think this has as much to do with how hard software became to understand as with the new shortcut to refusing to understand it and the shortsightedness in willing to take it.

We lost a lot of traction in the name of ease of staffing and speed. Using LLMs to generate more code that is harder to understand it catalyzes it but the root of the problem, in my opinion, was letting go of great design and deep understanding for short term profit.

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

#145

Post by sajithdilshan »

One time I had to do a system optimisation to increase the throughput of messages and was using Claude with Datadog and Couldwatch MCPs to figure out the bottlenecks by running load tests. it was Opus 4.8 and one of the most frustrating interactions with Claude I ever had.

It was just making up random stuff about AWS and system resource limitations and when I was asking for the source like from where it got that info, it was like, “I’m sorry I prematurely concluded that without checking sources”.

I would never trust an Agent to resolve incidents ever

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

#146

Post by konschubert »

itsalwaysgood wrote: post #134
konschubert wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'd say it's more about learning how to organize your work more efficiently. If you think about a product like marble: it's something that most be chiseled out of time. Some people can chisel better products: the AI is just a better chisel. Sometime still has to guide the chisel and judge the art/product. In our cases, the market judges products.

I think my point is that its sometimes (!) easier to use the manual chisel rather than go for the automatic chisel and then fix its mistakes.

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

#147

Post by dist-epoch »

Muromec wrote: post #82
yard2010 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been thinking about this lately - is it like using 3rd party libs to achieve stuff faster? As much as I would lovr to hand craft the datetime logic in my app, I might as well use luxon and invest this time somewhere else. Only now with llms, you get virtually infinite 3rd party libs you can use, you create them on the fly. So if you have strong engineering values, I would say simply it boils down to "contracts o…

It's not because with libraries you have a boundary somewhere and can decide to not care what's inside as long as the interface is stable and well designed. The problem of course you need to prioritise building well designed interfaces and decouple components from each other, and that's a skill most developers aren't good at.

Models are getting better. Astra for example refactored some code GPT-5.6 Sol wrote and extracted some related functionality in a separate file without prompting.

The models are also becoming very capable of suggesting architecture simplifications, but you need to ask for that, and you probably need some taste in picking from the suggestions, although the default ones are quite decent.

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

#149

Post by deadbabe »

huurtehoog wrote: post #120
noir_lord wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wa…

If anything, I think this hype cycle is fast exposing just how many people, teams, and companies just don't care about what is correct. They just wanna feel good about themselves and get paid. I for one welcome the fact that this whole thing has driven me back to books and deeper into the fundamentals. I have never read so much on math, hardware, and history as in the past 3 years or so.

Are you doing those things for your own enjoyment though, or to eventually capitalize on it?

And if it’s just for enjoyment, then doesn’t it make sense other people who want the same would just get a job where they can keep pushing things to an AI, feel good, get paid, then quickly get back to the hobbies they really love?

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

#150

Post by Richbeach »

willtemperley wrote: post #129
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…

> 30 minutes of patient, old school troubleshooting This is also the best way to understand a codebase, and it's quite enjoyable. I think the models are getting too egotistical. They're so confident of their fixes they won't bother suggesting basic techniques like isolation of the problem by disabling code paths, for example. They'll keep shotgunning less-and-less likely fixes with undiminishing confidence until the…

> and it's quite enjoyable

Used to be somewhat enjoyable. Nothing pleasant about digging around codebase that was heavily affected by the last 12-18 months of AI-ing.

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