Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

AI handles incidents, engineers lose touch with their systems

sylvainkalache.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

341–350 of 376 posts

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

#341

Post by ofjcihen »

tptacek wrote: post #340
ofjcihen wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Haha, it seems childish but if you’d like to go that route I’ll just point you to the original posters reply: >It's exposing the hypocrisy of privileged groups suddenly being treated like regular people, when they did NOTHING for decades to help others or even to protect themselves ("f* you, got mine", rockstar programmer, 10x programmer, talents everywhere, etc mentality). No unions, no collective bargaining, sheer…

What "pain" are you talking about? You keep trying to smuggle this framing in. I don't accept the premise.

No smuggling needed. The original poster and I are on the same page and I suspect you’re just playing games to avoid hard questions.

I’m assuming from that that fly.io may not have a great work culture.

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

#343

Post by tptacek »

ofjcihen wrote: post #341
tptacek wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What "pain" are you talking about? You keep trying to smuggle this framing in. I don't accept the premise.

No smuggling needed. The original poster and I are on the same page and I suspect you’re just playing games to avoid hard questions. I’m assuming from that that fly.io may not have a great work culture.

What a weirdly hostile and offensive response. I'm always struck by people who think they can namedrop my employers to shut down an argument, like we're just going to believe and profess whatever keeps people on message boards from being mean about the company.

But, no, I feel like throughout this thread I've been pretty consistently putting a question to you (what exactly do you mean by "pain" or mistreatment, given the original comment described other professionals having norms developers seem now to be recoiling from).

We can be done, though, obviously.

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

#344

Post by ofjcihen »

tptacek wrote: post #343
ofjcihen wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No smuggling needed. The original poster and I are on the same page and I suspect you’re just playing games to avoid hard questions. I’m assuming from that that fly.io may not have a great work culture.

What a weirdly hostile and offensive response. I'm always struck by people who think they can namedrop my employers to shut down an argument, like we're just going to believe and profess whatever keeps people on message boards from being mean about the company. But, no, I feel like throughout this thread I've been pretty consistently putting a question to you (what exactly do you mean by "pain" or mistreatment, given…

Nah it’s relevant, because if you hold these views to the point that you’re willing to avoid answering the question then obviously your world view is warped in what even you would consider a negative direction and therefor it’s important that others get a chance to be steered away from a potentially negative experience.

And to be fair, I don’t know what you expect when you advertise your place of work and then insensitively play games with serious subject matter on public message boards. I think the kids call that a self own.

But I agree, you don’t seem willing to put in writing what you’ve conveyed so this isn’t a growth experience for anyone.

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

#345

Post by Terr_ »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #252
oblio wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

Two imagined executive responses:

1. "Nonsense, if it was a code-quality issue from the AI stuff, we'd have seen problems sooner, like in the first few months or a year. Oh, sure, some engineers complained, but that was just an adjustment period because they stopped once we told them we didn't care and mandated that they up-skill into the new AI-centric workflow future."

2. "The bold new AI initiative I put into place can't possibly be wrong, this failure is on the engineers who were responsible for overseeing its operation. This is supremely disappointing because we made their jobs so easy, they no longer have to write code, just review several dozens of pages per day with unremitting paranoid vigilance and attention to detail."

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

#346

Post by alexpotato »

Been doing a lot of interviewing lately.

Despite not having written code for about 6 months due to using Claude etc, I've surprised myself with how much the "muscle memory" of leetcode etc has come back to me.

I say this b/c I think the veterans with years of coding, debugging etc experience can just pick back up the skills they need even if they're a bit rusty.

The junior folks on the other hand, I'm not so sure. Friends of mine that hire straight out of college are saying that a combination of going to college during COVID + LLMs + "cloud is all you need" has resulted in juniors who don't know how to solve problems nor architect basic software.

I guess we are all on some kind of chart where the slope of losing the experienced people who know what's going on and AI getting so good we don't need people are going to intersect at some point. And that intersection may be later than is good for society and engineering overall.

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

#347

Post by alexpotato »

solatic wrote: post #112

Author has a good head on their shoulders, but few if any companies are going to spend time on incident simulations for their SREs. Why not? Because even pre-AI, very few companies spend time practicing restoring their backups, or disaster recovery, or picking infrequently-used runbooks to practice, or seeing whether they can easily rotate secrets without downtime, or trying to redploy the system onto another vendor'…

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 incidents looked, what tools were used, what could have been done differently etc.

This was largely inspired by the following quote:

"Drills are for working on the infrequent actions that lead to big outcomes. A good example is heaving the ball from half court in basketball when the game is close. You can't control who will have the ball in that situation but you want everyone on the team familiar with what to do and how to do it."

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

#348

Post by glouwbug »

thunky wrote: post #316
glouwbug wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The field is already exploding in SLOC. If LLMs can generate 10x but only produce a 2x productivity boost in reasoning or understanding - each year -then neither humans or AI will be able to keep up with the mountains of slop that power everything from websites, telecom, banking, automotive, aerospace, industrial, medical, and renewables. Guess we’ll need even more human software engineers to fix it.

> Guess we’ll need even more human software engineers to fix it. This is what we've been doing for years before LLMs. Hiring a ton of devs to spit out code, which became another's burden. It just took longer and cost more.

Major critical software has always needed thousands of engineers to maintain million line codebases. LLMs can't reason across edge case failure modes, and better yet, LLMs generate compartmentalized modules which exponentially explodes the number of failure modes as LLM based codebases grow. Read how everyone here laments about Sol or Opus or GPT6 generates 10x the required number of lines

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

#349

Post by oblio »

ofjcihen wrote: post #337
oblio wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a universal programmer trait. Let's call them "culturally regular programmers": they are less social than the average person. They lean more libertarian and more selfish.

According to who and what? I think the entire open source community would like to have to have a word with you.

The Open Source community is programmers sharing with other programmers, and it's largely fueled by corporate interests these days.

The Free Software movement has largely failed by now, as shown by GPL 3/AGPL adoption.

And again, all of this was based on the fact that programmers were a "special breed" of people coddled by corporations. Now that the corporate mask is off and programmers are no longer (as) special, the whining is horrendous. And the libertarianism still won't go away.

> According to who and what?

To me, I've been around the block for several decades.

Again, not everyone, but the culturally regular programmer.

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

#350

Post by ghjkghjkghj »

tptacek wrote: post #343
ofjcihen wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No smuggling needed. The original poster and I are on the same page and I suspect you’re just playing games to avoid hard questions. I’m assuming from that that fly.io may not have a great work culture.

What a weirdly hostile and offensive response. I'm always struck by people who think they can namedrop my employers to shut down an argument, like we're just going to believe and profess whatever keeps people on message boards from being mean about the company. But, no, I feel like throughout this thread I've been pretty consistently putting a question to you (what exactly do you mean by "pain" or mistreatment, given…

reading through this it is obvious what the "pain" is and it does come across as you just avoiding the question. Just sayin
Post reply on HN