AI Is Quietly Deskilling SREs, Not Replacing Them
AI Isn't Replacing SREs. It's Deskilling Them
Drawing on Lisanne Bainbridge's 1983 'Ironies of Automation' and recent studies in medicine and aviation, this piece argues that as AI handles more incident response, SREs lose the hands-on practice that builds intuition for rare, complex failures. Junior engineers face 'never-skilling' as the training pipeline erodes. The author, from SigNoz, suggests deliberate inefficiency and human-in-the-loop design to keep expertise sharp.
The more you let the system handle, the worse you get at handling things yourself and here’s the truly dangerous part, you don’t feel it happening.
- 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.
- sloob
I work at a startup and often deal with every part of the stack--programming, deployment, db, cloud environment, networking blah blah. AI agents have just gotten superhuman at computer use. I will never be able to use AWS CLI as well as claude does. I can spend time poking around in AWS, manually reading logs, looking at routing tables, cross checking with data in db, whatever, or I can give claude readonly access to all of that stuff and it will solve the issue literally 10x faster than I could, write a detailed report I can pass on to whoever, etc. Is it sometimes BSing? yes, but it just keeps getting better.
All that said, skill atrophy is real. Thinking about getting back on the interview circuit is p scary because of it. I dunno wtf is gonna happen.
- 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.
- GlobalChubby
[delayed]
- ljouhet
SRE: https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Site_Reliability_Engineering
- jedberg
Terraform deskilled us too. No one is saying, "SREs should configure their infra by hand sometimes to not lose that skill".
If AI can handle it, great! We have a new tool -- let's make the tool better.
Let's figure out how to use AI to make us detect and resolve issues faster, and even better, prevent issues. I've always said we can't consistently hit 5 9's without automatic detection and remediation. We are there now.
Let's get everyone to 5 9s with AI!
- 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.
- simscitizen
This has been going on in other professions for a long time. See the "children of the magenta line" talk about pilots losing the ability to hand-fly.
Another oft-cited article here is William Langewiesche's article on the AF447 crash (https://archive.vanityfair.com/article/2014/10/the-human-fac...):
> To put it briefly, automation has made it more and more unlikely that ordinary airline pilots will ever have to face a raw crisis in flight—but also more and more unlikely that they will be able to cope with such a crisis if one arises. Moreover, it is not clear that there is a way to resolve this paradox.
- 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.
- 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