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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

#251

Post by bigstrat2003 »

neuronic wrote: post #117
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…

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.

Agreed. For AI to be something you can trust to operate autonomously, it needs to actually be able to understand the things it is working with and reason about them. LLMs cannot, by their very nature, do that. There can be no reliability with such a tool.

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

#252

Post by bigstrat2003 »

oblio wrote: post #194
Tade0 wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LLMs reduced interest on tech debt, but it's still there and people who have a tendency to acquire it will go bankrupt eventually.

"The code market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent." will probably be a thing.

That's certainly what I expect to happen. LLMs will ruin your software if you don't hand-hold them, but it'll take time for that to happen. And until that does happen, businesses hell bent on using them won't have anything to push them into realizing what a mistake it was to use them.

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

#253

Post by mawadev »

MichaelRo wrote: post #64
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…

>> he continues to vibe code through me So quit pair programming. I never did, never will do that, nor worked at a place that remotely encouraged that. Each to their own, that's how it should be.

I wish this was always possible, but sometimes you do it when stuff is ambigous or the task is almost undefined and you just can't reach far enough for someone to fix it, so going over it and talking is simpler

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

#254

Post by tarun_anand »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #241
eudamoniac wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find this shocking though not unbelievable. Could you share how you measure this accurately? I'm interested in integrating such measurements into our services as well.

I find it unbelievable. I've seen the code LLMs write and it sucks compared to what a typical human produces. The only way an LLM is doing better than human programmers is if your human programmers were producing really terrible work.

Believe it or not, most programmers by definition are average. Hence, producing code better than them is not a hard feat to achieve for today's models.

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

#256

Post by bigstrat2003 »

nekoashide wrote: post #235
sidhsjsjhz wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "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. Did you find out if it actually fixed the issue? I was on the other end of this last week. Reported an issue to another team, they asked Claude to diagnose, and when they gave…

To be clear, that one shot prompt was supported by nearly a years worth of work around developing an enviroment that allows me that level of effortless automation. The issues was really simple, I knew the application, I knew what the bug was and already had a workaround in my head. I simply stopped at going down that rabbit hole and told claude to deal. It identified the issue quickly, found the workaround and made t…

> The issues was really simple, I knew the application, I knew what the bug was and already had a workaround in my head.

If that's the case, Claude isn't gaining you anything. The hard (and time consuming) part of programming is finding the correct solution, not typing the characters into an editor. When I know the code and have a good idea of the solution, I can write the code to fix it in mere minutes.

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

#257

Post by LeafItAlone »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #241
eudamoniac wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find this shocking though not unbelievable. Could you share how you measure this accurately? I'm interested in integrating such measurements into our services as well.

I find it unbelievable. I've seen the code LLMs write and it sucks compared to what a typical human produces. The only way an LLM is doing better than human programmers is if your human programmers were producing really terrible work.

I personally find it unbelievable that you have access to all of the public GitHub projects available and still think the typical developer writes good code.

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

#258

Post by ffsm8 »

wegwerf17377382 wrote: post #77
ffsm8 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

The same way people have been doing so for years before ai. You may or may not remember, but the parent comment is basically a 1:1 copy of people complaining about how stack overflow provided young devs all the answers.

Some people took the answers and learned from them, incompetents just copy pasted them and called it a day.

The share of incompetence just went up significantly over the years, so its a lot more noticeable at this point.

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

#259

Post by filoeleven »

QuantumNomad_ wrote: post #19
onion2k wrote: post #14

Anyone who's worked in tech in a large company will probably have experienced having an ops team who use RPA tools to do repetitive tasks that tech teams get the blame for when things break. AI will make this so much worse. Things will break, everyone will assume 'tech knows the system', but really it's a new process outside of the tech teams that someone vibe coded but got it wrong. Audit trails, logs, and tight dat…

> Robotic process automation is a type of business process automation that automates tasks within business and IT processes using scripts that mimic human interaction with application user interfaces. For anyone else wondering what RPA means. Never heard that abbreviation before.

In practice, it is screen-scraping on meth. Horrible stuff. I understand that it's the only option available for some systems, but any client who asks for RPA support when APIs exist for the same data ought to be fired, or at least given a very stern "No."

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

#260

Post by [deleted] »

smugglerFlynn wrote: post #102

I 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…

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