As someone who works in Ops role (SRE/DevOps/Sysadmin), SREs are something that only works at Google mainly because for Devs to do SRE, they need ability to reject or demand code fixes which means you need someone being a prompt engineer who needs to understand the code and now they back to being developer.
As for more dedicated to Ops side, it's garbage in, garbage out. I've already had too many outages caused by AI Slop being fed into production, calling all Developers = SRE won't change the fact that AI can't program now without massive experienced people controlling it.
What? Maybe OPs future. SWE is just going to replace QA and maybe architects if the industry adopts AI more, but there's a lot of hold outs. There's plenty of projects out there that are 'boring' and will not bother.
stackskipton makes a good point about authority. SRE works at Google because SREs can block launches and demand fixes. Without that organizational power, you're just an on-call engineer who also writes tooling.
The article's premise (AI makes code cheap, so operations becomes the differentiator) has some truth to it. But I'd frame it differently: the bottleneck was never really "writing code." It was understanding what to build and keeping it running. AI helps with one of those. Maybe.
As an SRE I can tell you AI can't do everything. I have done a little software development, even AI can't do everything. What we are likely to see is operational engineering become the consolidated role between the two. Knows enough about software development and knows enough about site reliability... blamo operational engineer.
AI will not get much better than what we have today, and what we have today is not enough to totally transform software engineering. It is a little easier to be a software engineer now, but that’s it. You can still fuck everything up.
Operational excellence will always be needed but part of that is writing good code. If the slop machine has made bad decisions it could be more efficient to rewrite using human expertise and deploy that.
If the agent swarm is collectively smarter and better than the SRE, they'll be replaced just like other types of workers. There is no domain that has special protection.
> And you definitely don't care how a payments network point of sale terminal and your bank talk to each other... Good software is invisible.
> ...
> Are you keeping up with security updates? Will you leak all my data? Do I trust you? Can I rely on you?
IMO, if the answers to those questions matter to you, then you damn well should care how it works. Because even if you aren't sufficiently technically minded to audit the system, having someone be able to describe it to you coherently is an important starting point in building that trust and having reason to believe that security and privacy will work as advertised.
I think there's two kinds of software-producing-organizations:
There's the small shops where you're running some kind of monolith generally open to the Internet, maybe you have a database hooked up to it. These shops do not need dedicated DevOps/SRE. Throw it into a container platform (e.g. AWS ECS/Fargate, GCP Cloud Run, fly.io, the market is broad enough that it's basically getting commoditized), hook up observability/alerting, maybe pay a consultant to review it and make sure you didn't do anything stupid. Then just pay the bill every month, and don't over-think it.
Then you have large shops: the ones where you're running at the scale where the cost premium of container platforms is higher than the salary of an engineer to move you off it, the ones where you have to figure out how to get the systems from different companies pre-M&A to talk to each other, where you have N development teams organizationally far away from the sales and legal teams signing SLAs yet need to be constrained by said SLAs, where you have some system that was architected to handle X scale and the business has now sold 100X and you have to figure out what band-aids to throw at the failing system while telling the devs they need to re-architect, where you need to build your Alertmanager routing tree configuration dynamically because YAML is garbage and the routing rules change based on whether or not SRE decided to return the pager, plus ensuring that devs have the ability to self-service create new services, plus progressive rollout of new alerts across the organization, etc., so even Alertmanager config needs to be owned by an engineer.
I really can't imagine LLMs replacing SREs in large shops. SREs debugging production outages to find a proximate "root" technical cause is a small fraction of the SRE function.
There were several cheaper than programmers options to automate things, Robot Processing Automation being probably the most known, but it never get the expected traction.
Why (imo)? Senior leaders still like to say: I run a 500 headcount finance EMEA organization for Siemens, I am the Chief People Officer of Meta anf I lead an org of 1000 smart HR pros. Most of their status is still tight to the org headcount.
I was an old school SRE before the days of containerization and such. Today, we have one who is a YAML wizard and I won't even pretend to begin to understand the entire architecture between all the moving pieces(kube, flux, helm, etc).
That said, Claude has absolutely no problem not only answering questions, but finding bugs and adding new features to it.
In short, I feel they're just as screwed as us devs.
Operational excellency was always part of the job, regardless of what fancy term described it, be it DevOps, SRE or something else. The future of software engineering is software engineering, with emphasis on engineering.
> Writing code was always the easy part of this job. The hard part was keeping your code running for the long time.
Spoken like a true SRE. I'm mostly writing code, rather than working on keeping it in production, but I've had websites up since 2006 (hope that counts as long time in this corner of the internet) with very little down time and frankly not much effort.
My experience with SREs was largely that they're glorified SSH: they tell me I'm the programmer and I should know what to type into their shell to debug the problem (despite them SREing those services for years, while I joined two months ago and haven't even seen the particular service). But no I can't have shell access, and yes I should be the one spelling out what needs to be typed in.
Again there's a cognitive dissonance in play here where the future of coding is somehow LLMs and but at the same time the LLMS would not evolve not to handle the operations as well even if we disregard pipedreams about AGIs being just around the corner. Especially when markdown files for AI are essentially glorified runbooks.
> All he wanted was to make his job easier and now he's shackled to this stupid system.
What people failed to grasp about low-code/no-code tools (and what I believe the author ultimately says) is that it was never about technical ability. It was about time.
The people who were "supposed" to be the targets of these tools didn't have the time to begin with, let alone the technical experience to round out the rough edges. It's a chore maintaining these types of things.
These tools don't change that equation. I truly believe that we'll see a new golden age of targeted, bepsoke software that can now be developed cheaper instead of small/medium businesses utilizing off-the-shelf, one-size-fits-all solutions.
47 comments
[ 5.2 ms ] story [ 82.0 ms ] threadAs for more dedicated to Ops side, it's garbage in, garbage out. I've already had too many outages caused by AI Slop being fed into production, calling all Developers = SRE won't change the fact that AI can't program now without massive experienced people controlling it.
The article's premise (AI makes code cheap, so operations becomes the differentiator) has some truth to it. But I'd frame it differently: the bottleneck was never really "writing code." It was understanding what to build and keeping it running. AI helps with one of those. Maybe.
AI will not get much better than what we have today, and what we have today is not enough to totally transform software engineering. It is a little easier to be a software engineer now, but that’s it. You can still fuck everything up.
Look at the 'Product Engineer' roles we are seeing spreading in forward-thinking startups and scaleups.
That's the future of SWE I think. SWEs take on more PM and design responsibilities as part of the existing role.
> ...
> Are you keeping up with security updates? Will you leak all my data? Do I trust you? Can I rely on you?
IMO, if the answers to those questions matter to you, then you damn well should care how it works. Because even if you aren't sufficiently technically minded to audit the system, having someone be able to describe it to you coherently is an important starting point in building that trust and having reason to believe that security and privacy will work as advertised.
There's the small shops where you're running some kind of monolith generally open to the Internet, maybe you have a database hooked up to it. These shops do not need dedicated DevOps/SRE. Throw it into a container platform (e.g. AWS ECS/Fargate, GCP Cloud Run, fly.io, the market is broad enough that it's basically getting commoditized), hook up observability/alerting, maybe pay a consultant to review it and make sure you didn't do anything stupid. Then just pay the bill every month, and don't over-think it.
Then you have large shops: the ones where you're running at the scale where the cost premium of container platforms is higher than the salary of an engineer to move you off it, the ones where you have to figure out how to get the systems from different companies pre-M&A to talk to each other, where you have N development teams organizationally far away from the sales and legal teams signing SLAs yet need to be constrained by said SLAs, where you have some system that was architected to handle X scale and the business has now sold 100X and you have to figure out what band-aids to throw at the failing system while telling the devs they need to re-architect, where you need to build your Alertmanager routing tree configuration dynamically because YAML is garbage and the routing rules change based on whether or not SRE decided to return the pager, plus ensuring that devs have the ability to self-service create new services, plus progressive rollout of new alerts across the organization, etc., so even Alertmanager config needs to be owned by an engineer.
I really can't imagine LLMs replacing SREs in large shops. SREs debugging production outages to find a proximate "root" technical cause is a small fraction of the SRE function.
what do you mean "progressive rollout of new alerts across the organization"? what kind of alerts?
Why (imo)? Senior leaders still like to say: I run a 500 headcount finance EMEA organization for Siemens, I am the Chief People Officer of Meta anf I lead an org of 1000 smart HR pros. Most of their status is still tight to the org headcount.
That said, Claude has absolutely no problem not only answering questions, but finding bugs and adding new features to it.
In short, I feel they're just as screwed as us devs.
Spoken like a true SRE. I'm mostly writing code, rather than working on keeping it in production, but I've had websites up since 2006 (hope that counts as long time in this corner of the internet) with very little down time and frankly not much effort.
My experience with SREs was largely that they're glorified SSH: they tell me I'm the programmer and I should know what to type into their shell to debug the problem (despite them SREing those services for years, while I joined two months ago and haven't even seen the particular service). But no I can't have shell access, and yes I should be the one spelling out what needs to be typed in.
We just created a benchmark on adding distributed logs (OpenTelemetry instrumentation) to small services, around 300 lines of code.
Claude Opus 4.5 succeed at 29%, GPT 5.2 at 26%, Gemini 3 Pro at 16%.
https://quesma.com/blog/introducing-otel-bench/
What people failed to grasp about low-code/no-code tools (and what I believe the author ultimately says) is that it was never about technical ability. It was about time.
The people who were "supposed" to be the targets of these tools didn't have the time to begin with, let alone the technical experience to round out the rough edges. It's a chore maintaining these types of things.
These tools don't change that equation. I truly believe that we'll see a new golden age of targeted, bepsoke software that can now be developed cheaper instead of small/medium businesses utilizing off-the-shelf, one-size-fits-all solutions.