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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

#171

Post by oblio »

JauntyHatAngle wrote: post #123
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…

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…

> RPI loop

What's that?

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

#172

Post by sajithdilshan »

alchemism wrote: post #156
sajithdilshan wrote: post #145

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…

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.

I was was doing it in a separate load testing env. None of the agents have access to prod env.

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

#173

Post by cyanydeez »

konschubert wrote: post #61
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…

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 think the speed/context size of the large models is a threshold. I've been using a local model and watching it do killer stuff, and also shit out useless things; all in real time, requiring active steering.

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

#174

Post by itsalwaysgood »

konschubert wrote: post #146
itsalwaysgood wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They say writing engages more of the brain and helps us to remember what's written more than if we just read it, or copy and paste.

When you say it's easier to go manual, it seems you're talking about learning retention. And you're right.

But seniors have learned enough that they're able to iterate quickly with AI.

They know how to organize their work, manage change, tasks. They know how to break a problem down into smaller pieces. They're aware of context windows, token cost, estimated task lengths, etc. And most importantly, and to your point about ease: they have less to learn so retention isn't an issue.

I have no opinion about whether we're in a good or bad situation, just making arguments from the toilet really.

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

#175

Post by mawadev »

wccrawford wrote: post #53
mawadev wrote: post #25

Earlier 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…

I don't think it's generalizable. The kind of person who copy and pastes from the AI is the kind who did the same from StackOverflow before. It's more compelling, and we probably see more of them because of it, but it's the same general thing. The kind of person who insists on understanding things and working through the problem has always been rarer. It's not "humble", it's "inquisitive" and "persistent".

In essence, you are correct. What I see with LLMs is how they will happily make up stuff, meanwhile you can pretty much exhaust SO, until you are forced to understand the problem you are having.

You don't have to be a certain person to fall into this trap, you just condition your brain to accept this workflow somewhere.

Pair this with day to day work stress like time and amount of tasks and you almost give in to a sort of addiction to deal with it all.

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

#176

Post by skydhash »

bsoqk wrote: post #119
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.

>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. Most of us build a system to deliver a product to make money. We don't feel empty for not knowing how the system works, since we don't really care: it's just a means to an end.

> Most of us build a system to deliver a product to make money

Shouldn’t it be to deliver a system that is sold as a product? And even then that product is sold to consumers to solve their problems. Not knowing how it works means you don’t know what solution you’re selling.

You can see that in a lot of product announcement where the focus is on what they’re building, but not on how it solves some problem. The consumer is absent from the design process.

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

#177

Post by simonuv »

bsoqk wrote: post #119
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.

>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. Most of us build a system to deliver a product to make money. We don't feel empty for not knowing how the system works, since we don't really care: it's just a means to an end.

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

#178

Post by simonuv »

gmueckl wrote: post #84
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.

I find that it helps a little to maintain an iron grip on the design. Take the time for really detailed change planning. Be pedantic and push back against every little thing that seems wrong or even a little odd in any plan document the LLM spews out. Likewise, watch for the for the moment when the LLM eventually stumbles and starts to make excuses for deviations from the plan. Interrupt immediately and force it back…

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

#179

Post by nottorp »

piker wrote: post #164
nekoashide wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Often though working through a bug teaches the developer something about the relevant abstraction. That knowledge can get lost in this new process.

Claude will happily add a null guard without checking why the null is there in the first place...

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

#180

Post by simonuv »

anon7000 wrote: post #98
INTPenis wrote: post #55

Code too. I work with programmers and it's not uncommon that they can remember with shocking detail about code they've written in the past. Someone might mention an issue that has cropped up and they'll stare off into space for a few moments and actually remember where that issue stems from in the code, because they remember writing it like 8 months ago. This skill will be lost when AI is generating all code, we'll b…

I mean I think this is just how AI already operates. I’ve seen multiple models go digging in the git blame or past PRs, and even unmerged PRs. When agents work on a project that has well-defined in-repo docs, agents normally update them without prompting. So I doubt this will be a big issue for AI, but agreed we’re losing a skill

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