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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

#371

Post by nearlyepic »

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.

Yeah, well, some of us aren’t uninterested, cynical losers only in it for the money.

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

#373

Post by alexpotato »

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.

They were usually small outages that we caught before they got out of hand.

If you never have outages, then you need to start getting either creative with the "table top" exercises or you set up a test environment that is very prod like and have someone randomly turn off components aka chaos engineering.

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

#374

Post by fanatchipsov12 »

This is the future that has arrived. We need to embrace it, not resist it. We are now in a wonderful situation—the beginning of a new industrial revolution. We shouldn't fight it or suppress it; we need to embrace it.

I propose creating solutions and programs that will help engineers and coders take control of their projects and prevent AI from taking its course. This applies to all areas of life—economics, medicine, and much more.

AI is a wonderful technology that will accelerate our development. But it must remain a tool controlled by humans.

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

#375

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

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

#376

Post by acedTrex »

sevenseacat wrote: post #240
acedTrex wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was investigating an ansible playbook yesterday that had a 45 line comment to explain a single apt install command, completely and utterly useless. I am updating my neovim to just collapse all comments, the noise is unbearable.

I've seen people report cleaner code by forbidding agents from writing comments. Anecdotal, but interesting.

This is exactly what i do, i have a pi extension that blocks all comments.

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

#377

Post by LeafItAlone »

karlshea wrote: post #279
dayvid wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It also documents itself extensively

But then you’ll use it to change something, and it won’t update any of the extensive documentation. So then it’s filled with lies.

You need a better harness. LLMs are significantly better at this than humans. Add it as a step in your LLM process and your documentation will always be up to date.

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

#378

Post by LeafItAlone »

tempest_ wrote: post #291
dayvid wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It also documents itself extensively

I fucking hate it. It encodes context it needs into doc comments and regular comments that make them in insufferable to read and so verbose because the comments contain info on other parts of the code base (that might have changed since that comment was written) but were useful to the model for its implementation. I have so far found no way to stop claude from doing this. It will sometimes do it with hand holding but…

This is certainly a problem with out-of-the-box usage. But easily overcome. Spend time updating your harness. This is not a hard problem to solve and there are many helpful guides out there.

We basically took our documented (human) SDLC process and applied it to the relevant harness hooks. Since our SDLC docs talked about what good comments looked like and what to avoid, we basically had the direction for the tools. Opus 5 did throw us a loop and increase the verbosity and decrease usefulness of the text, but refining our documentation cleared that hurdle within about a day.

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