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

IDK... it's upskilling me ...

Why just SRE's it's deskilling everyone in this industry.

Deskilling is good, actually, as long as it's the right deskilling. "Skill" in software development is partly raw IQ and partly knowledge of complexity. Programming author Fred Brooks (author of The Mythical Man-Month) categorized complexity into "essential" and "incidental". Examples of incidental complexity are: React/Rails/Django/Laravel makes a backward-incompatible change to their interface and you need to scurry around the codebase fixing invocations. Or a senior developers on your team have a weird in-house coding style and all the junior devs need to learn it to get their code approved. Or management wants to move everything from one cloud provider to another so you have to change a bunch of resource URLs. Examples of essential complexity are: Self-driving car algorithms. Making your code run faster on the CPU. Adding support for a new web standard like SPDY.

I'm not lamenting the days when you needed to pull a seasoned (read: exquisitely expensive) COVOL developer out of retirement to make a change. Now AI can figure it out well enough, I just need to know how the basic concepts work.

I'm (still) a software engineer, and I've found it crucial to solve some LeetCode problems from time to time. It's honestly refreshing to write code yourself, make your own mistakes, and not end up low-key mad at a robot for failing to understand your lousy description because, apparently, it still can't read your mind.

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.

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.

I work a "dev"ops job, and like yeah, I'm pretty sure this field is even more fucked than software engineering is.

IaC codebases, configs, utility scripts are relatively tiny, and fit into context windows whole. Models are eating them for breakfast.

They're really good at incident response. Sadly, much better than our dedicated colleagues from <location> ever will be. They'll chew through cloud service logs, application logs, application code, iac code and config, CI output, etc. to get whatever is needed, cause wide knowledge is no issue. Even disassembling stuff is no barrier, tracing things down from app level, to runtime level (e.g. JVM), to native calls.

They're really good at handling deployments, end to end infra setup and migrations, following checklists. Hell, they don't even really need checklists. Something that cannot be said about other dedicated colleagues from <location>, who cannot breathe without a checklist, will skip over steps, or otherwise very creatively misinterpret them or improvise something wicked.

They're really good at spinning up mad nice dashboards, and keeping business types happy with impressive looking write-ups they'll never read. It's really refreshing to not have to write those write-ups anymore (or the aforementioned checklists).

It's straight up both not looking good and looking better than ever. Having it be fully hands off remains an issue though.

Wow. I wonder how the tech bros are gonna handle this thoughtful article.

The ubiquity of this rhetoric is not an indication of its correctness. Repetitive tropes like "deskilling", "losing the ability to think" reflect a deep seated distrust of AI alone. No matter how many people parrot these fears the fact remains that you choose your attention. My manager has started coding, heavily, aided by frontier LLMs. He instinctively knows his boundaries and defers much of the more complex work to his engineers. We use the clankers too. Have we been deskilled? Hardly appropriate. Trans-skilled, or learning a new emphasis built upon our long experience? Much closer to the truth.

[dead]

[dead]

[dead]

These posts are always pointing outwards.

Like it's the fault of someone else that you cannot say no.

Fuck you, you are just part of a privileged wanking industry and the whining is like hearing children fight.

I am going back to making my Napoletanian pizzas, so shut the fuck up and leave me at, at least these pizzas are not changing.

Wanks

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