AI handles incidents, engineers lose touch with their systems

In one line

AI-assisted incident response can lower MTTR while leaving engineers less prepared for the complex incidents automation cannot solve.

Opening excerpt

Back to the blog 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.

These AI-assisted incident response tools, more commonly called “AI SREs” – a term I don’t particularly like – are fantastic in many ways. They feel especially magical when they handle a routine incident at night and you don’t have to wake up for a capacity issue.

(Excerpted from the original; full article via the source link below.)

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