AI handles incidents, engineers lose touch with their systems

Post by nearlyepic » Sun, Sep 06, 2026, 6:51 AM UTC

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.

Post by alexpotato » Sun, Sep 06, 2026, 10:52 AM UTC

fastest963 wrote: post #362

alexpotato wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was the head of a global SRE team at a top tier hedge fund. We started doing a weekly meeting where whoever was on call would do a table top exercise of an outage that happened the prior week. The idea was to have someone else be the simulated person on call while the SRE from last week's oncall would talk them through the symptoms, what happened and where to look. The idea was to spread knowledge around how incide…

How often are there outages? Is there a significant outage every week to do simulations for? The problem with our organization is that outages are so rare that weekly we have nothing to discuss.

Post by [deleted] » Sun, Sep 06, 2026, 2:30 PM UTC

Richbeach wrote: post #150

willtemperley wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.