The article argues that as AI takes over routine incident response tasks for site reliability engineers (SREs), it risks deskilling them by reducing their hands-on experience with complex, novel outages that require deep expertise. Drawing parallels with historical automation research, the author warns that overreliance on AI can erode SRE intuition and muscle memory, making them less effective when critical, unprecedented incidents occur. To mitigate this, the article advocates for deliberate human engagement in incident handling and designing AI tools that keep humans cognitively active rather than sidelined.
https://newsletter.signoz.io/p/ai-isnt-replacing-sres-its-deskilling