same irony hits agentic remediation. ai clears routine incidents, humans inherit the sev0 with zero reps. shadow mode is the simulator.
AI handles incidents, engineers lose touch with their systems
151–160 of 378 posts
Re: AI handles incidents, engineers lose touch with their systems
#152Earlier 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…
Your assumption is that LLMs will ever leave this uncanny valley. Maybe unforeseen breakthroughs and different architectures are achieved. Given LLM fundamental shortcomings grounded in mathematics and information theory, I highly doubt they will and we will always need to deal with these issues in some capacity.
I think that bigger context windows help, but I feel that for AI to cross this chasm, it needs to be able to encode more abstract context knowledge. I think the holy grail here is online learning.
Re: AI handles incidents, engineers lose touch with their systems
#153Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
You are advocating for the kind of compartmentalization that got us here in the first place.
Re: AI handles incidents, engineers lose touch with their systems
#154Earlier 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.
You don’t need to copy-paste the same comment in every reply. It seems like agenda pushing more than contributing.
Sorry, you’re right it’s bad behaviour and I’ll stop it.
But I’m not really pushing an agenda here. I use Claude a ton myself.
Re: AI handles incidents, engineers lose touch with their systems
#155[flagged]
Re: AI handles incidents, engineers lose touch with their systems
#156One 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…
You would need to give it AWS credentials and MCPs for that. I’ve been sending agents into prod env for over a year now.
Re: AI handles incidents, engineers lose touch with their systems
#157A 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…
When I hear this I do wonder to myself how they're using AI. For me, as long as I'm properly RPI looping it and not blindly pressing "yes" then it will nearly always reach the solution, usually a fair bit quicker, because it effectively becomes an ideation machine that can keep more thoughts and knowledge in it than my brain can. However, I'm using it through giving it the context, it has access to the repos, access…
In my experience at a large bank with unlimited AI, my spend is in the top 5% and I'm leveraging AI just like you.
I was in a meeting with someone who had a bug in an application that I don't own myself on Friday so I told claude,
"I need you to find this bug the user is experiencing, find out if it's user error or a bug, let the user know and tell the developer what needs to be fixed if needed"
15 minutes later the developer ask me if I want it fixed today or Tuesday.
That user could have done the same thing as me, had access to all the same systems and tools as I have, and also received the same AI training I had. The difference is that some users are just not, for lack of better words, AI native.
Re: AI handles incidents, engineers lose touch with their systems
#158Earlier quoted context omitted.
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”.
Even that would be acceptable. But they still blame the programmer, who was pressured into this, for any fallouts because of it. Basically trying to have it both ways. The unreasonableness of it is infuriating.
Re: AI handles incidents, engineers lose touch with their systems
#159Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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Re: AI handles incidents, engineers lose touch with their systems
#160I recently had some issues with a game not working well on my Intel Arc B580. OpenAI (Anthropic's models definitely could too) ran some profiling inside of Windows, captured a few GB of data, sifted through it, identified the guilty .dll's and approximately where the issue was and traced it down to a single user-toggelable Unreal Engine 5 launch flag, which resolved it.
I feel like AI could easily do the same for servers and various software, BUT you gotta ground it in actual data so it can't make the shit up and just spew out garbage (if you tell it to come up with a potential answer it will even if it doesn't have the proper data to be "sure" of it).