AI handles incidents, engineers lose touch with their systems
This article discusses the paradox of AI-assisted incident response in software engineering, where automation reduces the need for human intervention in routine tasks. The author warns that this leads to a loss of system intuition among engineers, potentially leaving them unprepared for complex, novel failures.
Why it matters
As companies increasingly rely on AI for SRE tasks, the industry faces a critical skill gap that could lead to longer recovery times during major, non-routine system outages.
Back to the blog AI handles incidents, engineers lose touch with their systems When I was an SRE at LinkedIn, back in 2012, I designed a system that could heal itself and learn from previous incidents. AI capabilities were nowhere near what we have today, and that remained a prototype, but this is now a reality.
These tools do it all: inspect alerts, form hypotheses, query telemetry, correlate recent deployments, and even implement the fix themselves. As much as I love to see it, I have a major concern: we are losing touch with our systems.
The better these tools become at resolving routine incidents, the less practice human responders will get. And when an ambiguous, high-severity incident comes in that automation cannot solve, responding engineers will be in trouble.
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