AI isn't replacing SREs, it's deskilling them

dorianniemiec

I wanted to use this post as a source to write on my web server project's blog on why debuggable web infrastructure matters even if AI SRE agents exists, but the idea got delayed and I ended up posting it on HN... :')

recroad

I dug into general AI deskilling a couple days back[1] - no good signs anywhere, but there's a few things we can do like make concerted efforts to do programming (like a coding hour every week), do a Leet code question, and getting the agent to quiz before merging something (stolen from Notion). [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EWuf2EekRSM

okdood64

> Some immediate targets include multi-signal correlation across metrics, logs, and traces, autonomous root-cause analysis for partially understood failures AI is already pretty good at this in "SRE" workflows. > AI-driven change risk assessment And half decent at this.

bcvvvy

Yeah that. Watched our lot spending 2 hours using Claude to debug shit that was blindingly obvious if they actually didn't go to Claude first. If Claude goes down or stops existing when we go down, we're fucked.

temporallobe

At this point a company can effectively fire you by taking away access the Enterprise LLMs.

rubiquity

SRE was always a lame job description and so was the entire "DevOps" movement we had to suffer through during ZIRP. Real ones are oncall for the systems they build.

tayo42

> If human SREs (okay, now we have to use adjectives like human ) only engage with Tier 3 incidents, i.e. the novel, never-before-seen outages, where do they build the intuition to handle them? Ime this doesn't happen or reflect the reality of work. I had one mythical job where I wasn't directly on call and only received escalations and didn't have a problem with debugging whole system issues. I still worked on the whole system day to day. Also I feel like this post is also my frustration with sre. In people's minds it's just the job that deals with issues pumped out by swes and they have to work magic because no one else can be bothered to try at their job. This just reinforces that idea.

a012

We use AI at work, Claude specifically, and it’s faster than avg SRE for trivial tasks like cross signals correlation. But it requires a lot of effort to build a harness from your company contexts for it to work like an SRE. And it’s just a tool so if you have to build your knowledge to make it useful, otherwise it’s just a blunt. Or in other word, incompetent people are incompetent no matter of tools

jmyeet

This is happening to SWEs too. If you have a certain amount of experience, you are capable of critically analyzing AI output. In Big Tech parlance, these are the Senior SWEs and higher. You require little to no supervision and can work independently. But how do you make Senior+ SWEs? By having a pipeline of juniors who get trained and mentored. That pipeline is cooked now. There is going to be a brief period where some like Staff+ SWEs are going to make a lot of money by being AI specialists. But the flood waters are rising for everyone. Those opportunities are going to shrink. It's eventually going to be a problem that the ecosystem has died because there's no new blood and the people there lack the experience and critical thinking to understand what's being done. I can use AI on topics I know because I can spot the errors. LLMs lie a lot and get things wrong a lot. What happens when nobody can check the output?

docheinestages

Deskilling is not necessarily a bad thing, if what you refer to as skills are mundane things that should be automated. I do agree with the author in that people are becoming lazy when it comes to critical thinking and evaluating the decisions or work that AI presents to them. These are people who have little passion to do what they do, and for whom their role is primarily a chore.

andix

> "Just as the FAA mandates manual flying time even when the autopilot is perfectly capable, SRE teams can designate certain incidents, even the ones the AI could handle, as human-practice opportunities" This is a great example. Aviation is a perfect industry to learn from, they figured out a lot of things about how to keep humans from making mistakes. While complexity increases and automation takes away more and more tasks.

numbsafari

I assigned myself to re-read "Flowers for Algernon" based on my current frustrations with the team / cultural impacts of AI usage. It's mildly orthogonal, but I think the metaphor is really quite apropos.

solatic

Ops is bifurcating in two: * AI-resistant organizations led by graybeards who refuse to send telemetry off-prem (to either observability vendors or to inference providers) and will be dragged, kicking and screaming, into the future, over their cold, dead bodies. There's a lot of large, conservative organizations in this category like banks and governments, where budgets are rubber-stamped and Don't Break It If It Ain't Broken attitudes are tacitly approved of. * AI-accepting organizations where Ops will go through the same great narrowing that Dev is going through now - build the dark factory and let it run. You do still need people who know what good architecture looks like and to shepherd changes to improve the overall system to make it more observable, scalable, and maintainable. You do still need Non-Functional Software Engineers who don't answer to Product, for the sheer political reason that you need people who have a long-term perspective, compared to Product that has a short-term perspective. The business will make decisions like "Vendor X is too expensive so we're migrating to Vendor Y" and you will need somebody to drive the agents to make that happen in a way that respects availability and compliance requirements. You probably don't need, in the long-term, a whole team of people to handle it, let alone a whole group or a whole division. At the end of the day... focus on being a strong engineer. Somebody will always be needed to take care of the trees.

hparadiz

Seeing this posted a week after I had to emergency push cve fixes to 1200 servers in production is pretty funny. Every person on my team is capable of networking, product engineering, database, job processing and we have command of the entire stack. We will push updates for CVEs with stuff we manually compiled. We own the build system and have the ability to change product as needed. We all have experience in product and we're all capable of pushing fixes as needed. Frankly the SRE team is by far the smartest team I have ever worked with at any company I've ever worked at.

colinrand

10000% agree. I am seeing this first hand. SRE and NOCs folks are turning into meat proxies.

himata4113

I like this analogy that I've come up with: Non-writers can produce impressive articles that are unbearable to read the same way non-programmers can produce impressive software that is unbearable to use.

0x1F8B

If it deskills that guy who reaches for complex bash when they should reach for golang but they don't want to bother with writing the build layer in the image, then I'm all for it.

cadamsdotcom

Here's a thought experiment: why is it that I can't do long division? The Calculator! Calculators deskilled long division! Thing is though: who gives a damn about long division? The real task is your taxes or making a massive BI report for your presentation tomorrow. AI makes stuff that was hard - someone's bread and butter - possible to ask for and have done for you. Why bother staying skilled at those things when you can broaden? It clears the way for tasks that used to take forever to become something to steamroll through on your way to a much greater outcome. It's the micro way that, in the macro, humanity becomes far more capable as a species. The gates are being flung wide open and the gatekeepers are being lapped and they have blogs! It's not a tragedy, it's universal access to leverage.

pluc

SRE was always about understanding; understanding data flow, understanding bottlenecks, understanding logs, understanding application architecture, understanding end user functionality, understanding break points, SLIs, SLOs. Understanding how to mitigate, gracefully deteriorate, restart, restore, recreate, scale, etc. There is no understanding with AI-generated applications, full stop.

butwhat

No it's forcing everyone to realize all the jargon was made up to sell books and land speaking engagements. Money from patents (2016 Alice ruling upending that whole scam). Yall this was always just a money making scheme. Never was it meant to carry humanity into the future.