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.