AI handles incidents, engineers lose touch with their systems
- ID
- 21767
- Status
- summarized
- Published
- 05 Sep 2026, 3:52 PM
- Fetched
- 07 Sep 2026, 4:25 PM
- Provider
- Hacker News
- Category
- dev-community
- Original URL
- https://www.sylvainkalache.com/blog/ai-handles-incidents-engineers-lose-touch-with-their-systems
- Source URL
- https://hnrss.org/best
Summary
- Score
- 7.5
- Created
- 07 Sep 2026, 5:35 PM
- Tags
- Audience
- developersai_agent_userssaas_founders
What happened
Sylvain Kalache, former SRE at LinkedIn, argues that AI-assisted incident response tools ('AI SREs') are creating a dangerous skills gap by handling routine incidents, which are how engineers build intuition for system behavior. He predicts average MTTR will drop but resolution time for complex, novel incidents will spike because human responders will have less practice. He draws on Lisanne Bainbridge's 1983 'Ironies of Automation' paper and compares the situation to aviation, where pilots train extensively in simulators for rare failures they may never encounter in a career.
Why it matters
If your team adopts AI incident response tooling, you need to deliberately compensate for the lost practice—consider running manual incident drills or 'game days' for complex failure scenarios, similar to aviation simulator training, so engineers stay sharp for the incidents AI can't solve. Don't assume lower MTTR on routine incidents means your team is actually getting better at incident response.
Discussion angle
What's your team's plan for keeping incident response skills sharp once AI handles the routine 3am pages—are you running game days, and if so, what scenarios do you drill that AI tools would fail on?