2026-09-05 / Signal #5
AI now handles the incidents. Engineers are losing the muscle memory.
“The AI that fixes your outages is also deleting the only people who still understand why they happen.”
The Story
AI tools now inspect alerts, form hypotheses, query telemetry, and often ship the fix. Routine incidents—the ones that used to train human intuition—are disappearing. Kalache’s fear: when a never-seen-before SEV hits, the humans who take over will have had years less practice. Average MTTR will fall; the rare disasters will take much longer.
Why It Matters
Builder identity crisis. The craft of “I know how this system fails” is being automated away by the same systems. Future-shock for people who still think on-call is a human skill.
Evidence
Sylvain Kalache essay (ex-LinkedIn SRE), HN front page
Sources
Daily scan: 2026-09-05