A natural evolution of engineers losing touch with the customers and users.
I'm noticing some of the concern play out regarding AI weakening the capabilities of software people.
I gave the team an exact solution on a silver platter and they still failed to identify how to go about it after 3 days slamming it into Claude. The resolution is literally 1 line of code that could be arrived at in about 30 minutes of patient, old school troubleshooting.
I think what's happening is the AI system draws poorly aligned and led engineers into this ego inflation feedback loop where they are completely detached from reality because these tools can simulate a better one.
I'm seeing this happen in the security space right now. Someone on my team I was helping train and bring along is all of sudden regressing in their understanding of the issues we're working on, and instead focusing on AI tool outputs to do their job for them.
Usually, I take my time to understand each keyword of the code I'm looking at, especially if it is new to me, like terraform.
I work in a team/with one architect, who only did the DevOps/Infra stuff for the past years and I had the expectation he knows what he is doing and talking about.
At around 2 weeks, I noticed how his knowledge has severe gaps and how he takes things at face value or uses terminology interchangably, which confuses me. It sounds plausible, but it does not actually translate into a working system or shared understanding.
Then one day I did some pair programming with him and whenever there was an error or a resource missing, he would type it into the LLM, copy paste it out of it and then brute force error messages. He did not even wait a second to think or reconcile whats happening on the screen or what the exact requirement is. Never taking one step back and questioning any assumption.
Now that the timeline is shifting and everyone starts to be stressed, he continues to vibe code through me and it is so tiring, there is no higher level planning or architecture, its just a reactive type of trial and error to be faster.
It feels like these people are so used to talking to bots, that they treat you like an agent they can chat to or talk through monologs with.
It is quite shocking how people went from being humble (learn the basics or close the gaps in understanding) to full on authority on everything and berating people 24/7...
So right now I'm considering quitting IT for a couple of years until people calm down, but I think its pretty futile
At my place, this is what they want. They want people to smash through things as fast as possible. They don’t want people to sit and craft a solution which takes in to account the whole. They are choosing tools which are low code, and use llm’s to produce what they need. as they say “this is the way things are going”.
You captured this phenomenon very well in this comment. Appreciate you sharing it because it’s hard to describe exactly what makes this sort of behavior so bizarre.
I it usually doesn't get me in this weird state of mind, but I once spent 6 months (all-in) building a thing that I, once finished, just left alone completely (on disk gathering dust). Weird experience. So I'd say AI physchosis is real.
I think LLMs have some of the same risks and benefits of stimulant drugs. They can make you more productive if used effectively as a tool, but they can also delude you into thinking you are better than you are and create a dependence such that you aren't just less productive without the LLM/drug, you fail to be productive at all because you don't know how to function without it.
I think there are many cases where it was the tech workers themselves who argued for isolation from the customer so that they may focus harder on whatever tasks. I used to be one of these workers. I argued very hard for it. I regret that today.
On the surface it seems rational, but it quickly turns into a system of perverse incentives because now the development team must maintain an illusion that they are constantly overwhelmed with tasks and could never hope to spare a microsecond to assist the customer. This misalignment is how you wind up building your own web frameworks and databases from scratch. It turns into a self serving monster that eventually dominates the entire business. From the perspective of the business, many of these development teams look like they're behind some modern day iron curtain.
If the solution is so simple, why claude did not found it? At this point we can assume, it is better than 90% of engineers (including me).
After three decades of outsourcing to lowest bidder, I do not buy that humans are somehow better!
> patient, old school troubleshooting
I usually see similar arguments around systems with major red flags (no docs, poor CI, decade ago no CVS...). And engineers with private stash of workarounds for job security!
Claude does not do anything special.
Or perhaps claude was misconfigured, it had no access to relevant part of system, and it tryied to work within its limitation. Often it means decompiling binaries in desperate loop...
The funny thing is that if you never understand the codebase then you will keep thinking Claude is doing a great work delivering all this incredible software, when all it has done is created unnecessary tech debt.
I am former java enterprise dev, so yes I often code this way. Unit testing, decomposition... Some projects CI refuse to merge commits with 20 line loop and duplicated code...
But that is not a point. Claude can code tight compact loops, it just needs to be instructed to do so! If it does "enterprise code", it means it had no instructions about code style.
If your documentation, spec, agent.md does not have proper guidance on coding style... yet another red flag!
Because simplicity is hard and often the result of careful thought. Anybody can keep piling pile of shit on top of pile of shit which is why that sort of code is so common in our industry.
So after 30 years of outsourcing to the bottom 10%, you think Claude is better than the bottom 90% even though it’s so stupid that it doesn’t even know it should ask for advice or more information when it’s stuck?
While I actually agree with you (though, outsourcing to lowest bidder would account for much of what you're seeing with humans), I just saw Bug Hunt Bench scores that gave me some pause:
Claude Opus 4.8 ranks near last on this Bug Hunt benchmark, and missed 96% of the deliberately introduced bugs. If you're a developer who has been falling back to Opus 4.8 because of how Opus 5 talks, and Fable 5 being so expensive that it needs to be rationed... well, turns out Opus 4.8 can actually be quite poor for finding bugs.
(Which feels weird to me, because Opus 4.6 fixed a bug that myself and a group of humans had been hunting down for over a decade. Models are spiky.)
Also surprising to me: Luna Max performing better than Fable 5.1 High, at least on this benchmark. But Astra 6 & Fable 5.1 on Max both perform at the top as you would expect.
> At this point we can assume, it is better than 90% of engineers (including me).
Hard disagree. We absolutely cannot assume that. You can posit it, and we can have an informed debate about it. This is what irks me the most about LLM fans: they constantly try to reframe the debate to have their worldview as the agreed-upon starting point.
This is why the paradigm for AI use should not be automation but rather the cyborg. Under automation, people are less active and engaged and become mere operators of automated processes. They become slaves of the machines. Under the cyborg model, they arrange the machines in a way to make people masters of a universe that includes the machines helping them be that.
The more code writes autonomously, the less intuition the human owners have about that code. Loss of intuition is a seed of technical debt that grows with time. Over a long enough horizon, it can make looking at your own codebase feel like the first day on the job (sometimes at a company you started).
Luckily, there are ways to mitigate this and essentially translate those human intuition of how the codebase “should” be into guardrails for the agents. But without that, your setting your sails in a stochastic sea where each wave looks nothing like the last.
I've been thinking about this lately - is it like using 3rd party libs to achieve stuff faster? As much as I would lovr to hand craft the datetime logic in my app, I might as well use luxon and invest this time somewhere else. Only now with llms, you get virtually infinite 3rd party libs you can use, you create them on the fly. So if you have strong engineering values, I would say simply it boils down to "contracts over programs", you can still be in touch with the logic that glues it all together and treat some logic as a blackbox the same way we do with 3rd party libs?
The article does not get the point. What aircraft companies did was separate training and work, and SRE/IT typically does not.
An AI can handle routine incidents and then present learning cases from that routine work for training, because the skill in SRE is not the mechanical log grepping, grafana dashboard browsing etc but forming the hypothesis. AI incident reports can create training cases that are a much better training for hypothesis forming and testing than the work itself can.
The more I use it, the more I have to rely on it to make changes/ fix things in the same system. In the end, I come out feeling empty; no intuitive knowledge of the system "I" built or fixed.
Code review is important but it does not replace the mental model I am able to build when I do all the steps of software development manually without AI.
If capability increase continues as it has, then an incident that cannot be resolved by AI will stump humans no matter the practice.
I like the plane example from the article,but I think in reality it will be like code. 1.5 years ago engineers would routinely say that they still write code by hand here or there to keep their skills sharp, and that's just not something you hear much if at all.
If an SRE is faced with a situation an AI can't solve, then said SRE will use the AI systems to triage further, point it to different places and so on.
This works for SREs with pre-AI experience and intuition, possibly less so with new recruits coming in post-AI. I don't know what the solution to this is, maybe practice drills is it, but I have a hunch the entire field will be subsumed, same as many other engineering fields.
There is only so much need for taste and judgement, before even that has been incorporated into the models.
> If capability increase continues as it has, then an incident that cannot be resolved by AI will stump humans no matter the practice.
I disagree with this. Whatever the AI produces must be embodied in some kind of information system. The moment the output is on disk, it's fish in a barrel for any competent operator.
I've worked in environments that are beyond the pale with regard to complexity. It will take AI another 10 years to product something as complicated and coherent as a semiconductor manufacturing operating system, which is clearly feasible for humans to manage today.
Like the fact that software "engineering" is mostly nothing like real engineering (and it’s further regressing now due to LLM coding!), the general lack of drilling is again one of the things that make software-related stuff look really naive and amateurish from the perspective of those dealing with the real world. Imagine if the military, police, fire service, and so on did not drill and rehearse incident response?
Nah, LLM models are already the new compilers. A commodity only engineers know how to use (in the context of software engineering in production environments)
Out of context, but to address "AI will replace engineers".
Recently discussed something about economy/investing with a friend while at work at a slaughterhouse. I really didn't want him to get scammed buying crypto.
So, used ChatGPT to find some sources in Somali, a 3 videos with short description why it's worth watching. Intro into investing, intro about cryptocurrencies and about buying them. Had the text shortened down to 3 pretty short paragraphs, not more than twice this post.
He's a smart guy, but only went to primary Qur'an school. Doesn't read or such, mostly consumes internet in form of video/media. He couldn't read those 3 paragraphs, it was too long. Or rather, it wasn't just 3 paragraphs, it was a lot to read.
Maybe we're already dividing into murlocs and the surface dwellers?
I've seen a variation of this where random engineers are pulled into production incident calls and engineers are not expected to be familiar with the system.
They were asked to "just use AI" and understand the component, triage the issue, build a fix etc. The engineer was forced to choose between accepting a potentially mediocre fix AI has suggested or risk being coming across as an incompetent resource who doesn't know how to leverage AI.
You can guess what the engineer chose. The fix wasn't bad but it was suboptimal for some edge cases. We had to later revise it. Have enough of these situations, engineers will eventually definitely give up understanding the system in detail.
Anyone who's worked in tech in a large company will probably have experienced having an ops team who use RPA tools to do repetitive tasks that tech teams get the blame for when things break. AI will make this so much worse. Things will break, everyone will assume 'tech knows the system', but really it's a new process outside of the tech teams that someone vibe coded but got it wrong.
Audit trails, logs, and tight data governance where things can only be accessed with proper roles is the only possible solution.
If an RPA team ever gets direct access to a production database in your company, look for a new job.
> Robotic process automation is a type of business process automation that automates tasks within business and IT processes using scripts that mimic human interaction with application user interfaces.
For anyone else wondering what RPA means. Never heard that abbreviation before.
Meta: The blinking cursor of the "logo" of the blog being sticky in the top left corner makes it impossible for me to read the text. It constantly fires interrupts at me.
Depending on what your goals as the author are, you may or may not want that.
Being able to scroll it out of view might be enough to achieve the aesthetics goal, and the goal of people actually listening to you.
You’d hope these AI incident responders have very constrained production tools to fix things. You’d hope the humans remain familiar with those tools and they are incredibly well documented.
Isn't there anywhere to "go" from here? In the last decades, introducing new high level abstractions on top of existing paradigms naturally had everyone move up the ladder and work at the next higher level, why should this be different these days? Do we think AI will reach the top of the abstraction ceiling, so there's no where to go from here?
I am exceedingly tired of poor metaphors that are popping up since AI has taken over writing.
No, operating software is not like operating a plane. Not at all in fact. The people operating the software and resolving incidents are the same people who created the software in the first place, and continue to work on it day to day. Pilots have not and don't.
Ironies of Automation is front and center in this article which is awesome. Many of the conversations on AI automation are describing or rediscovering the insights the paper covered.
Good article and I like the callouts to the aviation industry. For me what's missing is the author should also have touched on CRM and SRM.
Also, that paper "The Ironies of Automation" is one that everyone should read. It's fairly short.
There is a related problem in terms of these situations where the computer system is handing off to the human. It's called "the bumpy transfer of control." Very fascinating concept.
I'm noticing some of the concern play out regarding AI weakening the capabilities of software people.
I gave the team an exact solution on a silver platter and they still failed to identify how to go about it after 3 days slamming it into Claude. The resolution is literally 1 line of code that could be arrived at in about 30 minutes of patient, old school troubleshooting.
I think what's happening is the AI system draws poorly aligned and led engineers into this ego inflation feedback loop where they are completely detached from reality because these tools can simulate a better one.
Usually, I take my time to understand each keyword of the code I'm looking at, especially if it is new to me, like terraform.
I work in a team/with one architect, who only did the DevOps/Infra stuff for the past years and I had the expectation he knows what he is doing and talking about.
At around 2 weeks, I noticed how his knowledge has severe gaps and how he takes things at face value or uses terminology interchangably, which confuses me. It sounds plausible, but it does not actually translate into a working system or shared understanding.
Then one day I did some pair programming with him and whenever there was an error or a resource missing, he would type it into the LLM, copy paste it out of it and then brute force error messages. He did not even wait a second to think or reconcile whats happening on the screen or what the exact requirement is. Never taking one step back and questioning any assumption.
Now that the timeline is shifting and everyone starts to be stressed, he continues to vibe code through me and it is so tiring, there is no higher level planning or architecture, its just a reactive type of trial and error to be faster. It feels like these people are so used to talking to bots, that they treat you like an agent they can chat to or talk through monologs with.
It is quite shocking how people went from being humble (learn the basics or close the gaps in understanding) to full on authority on everything and berating people 24/7...
So right now I'm considering quitting IT for a couple of years until people calm down, but I think its pretty futile
At my place, this is what they want. They want people to smash through things as fast as possible. They don’t want people to sit and craft a solution which takes in to account the whole. They are choosing tools which are low code, and use llm’s to produce what they need. as they say “this is the way things are going”.
On the surface it seems rational, but it quickly turns into a system of perverse incentives because now the development team must maintain an illusion that they are constantly overwhelmed with tasks and could never hope to spare a microsecond to assist the customer. This misalignment is how you wind up building your own web frameworks and databases from scratch. It turns into a self serving monster that eventually dominates the entire business. From the perspective of the business, many of these development teams look like they're behind some modern day iron curtain.
After three decades of outsourcing to lowest bidder, I do not buy that humans are somehow better!
> patient, old school troubleshooting
I usually see similar arguments around systems with major red flags (no docs, poor CI, decade ago no CVS...). And engineers with private stash of workarounds for job security!
Claude does not do anything special.
Or perhaps claude was misconfigured, it had no access to relevant part of system, and it tryied to work within its limitation. Often it means decompiling binaries in desperate loop...
Overabstracting, deduplicating things that don't need to be. Building metaclasses because it saw a single orchestrator in the whole codebase.
If it is a better engineer than you... You need practice.
But that is not a point. Claude can code tight compact loops, it just needs to be instructed to do so! If it does "enterprise code", it means it had no instructions about code style.
If your documentation, spec, agent.md does not have proper guidance on coding style... yet another red flag!
Some asian devs will go for weeks without asking for help, all while giving amazing fake status reports. Loosing face etc...
https://x.com/PawelHuryn/status/2095982259761475945
https://bughunt.productcompass.pm/?preset=all
Claude Opus 4.8 ranks near last on this Bug Hunt benchmark, and missed 96% of the deliberately introduced bugs. If you're a developer who has been falling back to Opus 4.8 because of how Opus 5 talks, and Fable 5 being so expensive that it needs to be rationed... well, turns out Opus 4.8 can actually be quite poor for finding bugs.
(Which feels weird to me, because Opus 4.6 fixed a bug that myself and a group of humans had been hunting down for over a decade. Models are spiky.)
Also surprising to me: Luna Max performing better than Fable 5.1 High, at least on this benchmark. But Astra 6 & Fable 5.1 on Max both perform at the top as you would expect.
If model can not automatically reproduce bug, while human manually can... you got a problem in CI.
> Luna Max performing better than Fable 5.1 High
Perhaps you are reading too many benchmarks.
Hard disagree. We absolutely cannot assume that. You can posit it, and we can have an informed debate about it. This is what irks me the most about LLM fans: they constantly try to reframe the debate to have their worldview as the agreed-upon starting point.
Luckily, there are ways to mitigate this and essentially translate those human intuition of how the codebase “should” be into guardrails for the agents. But without that, your setting your sails in a stochastic sea where each wave looks nothing like the last.
An AI can handle routine incidents and then present learning cases from that routine work for training, because the skill in SRE is not the mechanical log grepping, grafana dashboard browsing etc but forming the hypothesis. AI incident reports can create training cases that are a much better training for hypothesis forming and testing than the work itself can.
The more I use it, the more I have to rely on it to make changes/ fix things in the same system. In the end, I come out feeling empty; no intuitive knowledge of the system "I" built or fixed.
Code review is important but it does not replace the mental model I am able to build when I do all the steps of software development manually without AI.
I like the plane example from the article,but I think in reality it will be like code. 1.5 years ago engineers would routinely say that they still write code by hand here or there to keep their skills sharp, and that's just not something you hear much if at all.
If an SRE is faced with a situation an AI can't solve, then said SRE will use the AI systems to triage further, point it to different places and so on.
This works for SREs with pre-AI experience and intuition, possibly less so with new recruits coming in post-AI. I don't know what the solution to this is, maybe practice drills is it, but I have a hunch the entire field will be subsumed, same as many other engineering fields.
There is only so much need for taste and judgement, before even that has been incorporated into the models.
I disagree with this. Whatever the AI produces must be embodied in some kind of information system. The moment the output is on disk, it's fish in a barrel for any competent operator.
I've worked in environments that are beyond the pale with regard to complexity. It will take AI another 10 years to product something as complicated and coherent as a semiconductor manufacturing operating system, which is clearly feasible for humans to manage today.
Recently discussed something about economy/investing with a friend while at work at a slaughterhouse. I really didn't want him to get scammed buying crypto. So, used ChatGPT to find some sources in Somali, a 3 videos with short description why it's worth watching. Intro into investing, intro about cryptocurrencies and about buying them. Had the text shortened down to 3 pretty short paragraphs, not more than twice this post.
He's a smart guy, but only went to primary Qur'an school. Doesn't read or such, mostly consumes internet in form of video/media. He couldn't read those 3 paragraphs, it was too long. Or rather, it wasn't just 3 paragraphs, it was a lot to read.
Maybe we're already dividing into murlocs and the surface dwellers?
They were asked to "just use AI" and understand the component, triage the issue, build a fix etc. The engineer was forced to choose between accepting a potentially mediocre fix AI has suggested or risk being coming across as an incompetent resource who doesn't know how to leverage AI.
You can guess what the engineer chose. The fix wasn't bad but it was suboptimal for some edge cases. We had to later revise it. Have enough of these situations, engineers will eventually definitely give up understanding the system in detail.
Audit trails, logs, and tight data governance where things can only be accessed with proper roles is the only possible solution.
If an RPA team ever gets direct access to a production database in your company, look for a new job.
For anyone else wondering what RPA means. Never heard that abbreviation before.
Depending on what your goals as the author are, you may or may not want that.
Being able to scroll it out of view might be enough to achieve the aesthetics goal, and the goal of people actually listening to you.
I agree with premise of thr blog. The question i have been asking internal does knowing your system really matter if you can recreate it in minutes.
We recently had a situation, where in with our internal platform and claude we recreated everything in minutes.
Management in the end cares about the outcome and not how the meat is made.
No, operating software is not like operating a plane. Not at all in fact. The people operating the software and resolving incidents are the same people who created the software in the first place, and continue to work on it day to day. Pilots have not and don't.
Also, that paper "The Ironies of Automation" is one that everyone should read. It's fairly short.
There is a related problem in terms of these situations where the computer system is handing off to the human. It's called "the bumpy transfer of control." Very fascinating concept.