alt Hacker NewsBlameless postmortem culture recognizes human error as an inevitability and asks those with influence to design systems that maintain safety in the face of human error. In the software engineering world, this typically means automation, because while automation can and usually does have faults, it doesn't suffer from human error.
Now we've invented automation that commits human-like error at scale.
I wouldn't call myself anti-AI, but it does seem fairly obvious to me that directly automating things with AI will probably always have substantial risk and you have much more assurance, if you involve AI in the process, using it to develop a traditional automation. As a low-stakes personal example, instead of using AI to generate boilerplate code, I'll often try to use AI to generate a traditional code generator to convert whatever DSL specification into the chosen development language source code, rather than asking AI to generate the development language source code directly from the DSL.
Yeah I see things like "AI Firewalls" as both, firstly ridiculously named, but also, the idea you can slap an applicance (thats sometimes its own LLM) onto another LLM and pray that this will prevent errors to be lunacy.
For tasks that arent customer facing, LLMs rock. Human in the loop. Perfectly fine. But whenever I see AI interacting with someones customer directly I just get sort of anxious.
Big one I saw was a tool that ingested a humans report on a safety incident, adjusted them with an LLM, and then posted the result to an OHS incident log. 99% of the time its going to be fine, then someones going to die and the the log will have a recipe for spicy noodles in it, and someones going to jail.