--- title: AI Isn't Replacing SREs. It's Deskilling Them | daily.dev description: Heavy reliance on AI for incident response may be quietly eroding SRE expertise rather than replacing SREs outright. The argument draws on Lisanne Bainbridge's... canonical: https://daily.dev/posts/ai-isn-t-replacing-sres-it-s-deskilling-them-llmqifafl twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:site: @dailydotdev og:type: website og:site_name: daily.dev og:title: AI Isn't Replacing SREs. It's Deskilling Them | daily.dev og:description: Heavy reliance on AI for incident response may be quietly eroding SRE expertise rather than replacing SREs outright. The argument draws on Lisanne Bainbridge's... og:url: https://daily.dev/posts/ai-isn-t-replacing-sres-it-s-deskilling-them-llmqifafl og:image: https://api.daily.dev/og/posts/llMQIfAfL.png og:image:alt: AI Isn't Replacing SREs. It's Deskilling Them og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 630 og:locale: en --- > ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # AI Isn't Replacing SREs. It's Deskilling Them **[Hacker News](https://daily.dev/sources/hn)** · 9 min read · 1 upvotes · 0 comments ## Summary Heavy reliance on AI for incident response may be quietly eroding SRE expertise rather than replacing SREs outright. The argument draws on Lisanne Bainbridge's 1983 'Ironies of Automation' paper, which found automation leaves human operators with rare, high-stakes crises they're increasingly unprepared for. A cited study found endoscopists using AI assistance saw unassisted polyp detection rates drop from 28% to 22%. Long-haul pilots relying on autopilot show measurable loss of manual flying skill, prompting the FAA to mandate more manual flying time. Researchers call the newer version of this problem 'never-skilling', where junior staff never build the skill at all. Suggested fixes include deliberate inefficiency and keeping humans actively in the loop rather than just approving AI output. ## Full article daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: ## Questions this post answers ### What is the 'ironies of automation' concept and who coined it It is a theory from cognitive psychologist Lisanne Bainbridge's 1983 paper, arguing that the more a process is automated, the more critical the human operator becomes during rare automation failures, yet the less practice they get, making them worse at exactly those interventions. This creates long stretches of passive monitoring followed by high-stakes crises operators are unprepared for. _Teams rolling out AI incident response can weigh this tradeoff using analysis like this on daily.dev._ ### Does using AI assistance make medical professionals worse at their unassisted skills Yes, a study on endoscopists found their unassisted polyp detection rate dropped from 28% to 22% after a period of using AI assistance for polyp detection. The decline happened not because they forgot the theory, but because they stopped practicing the skill themselves, an effect researchers describe as deskilling. _Anyone deciding how much to lean on AI tooling can track findings like this on daily.dev._ ### What is 'never-skilling' as opposed to deskilling in the context of AI tools Never-skilling means a worker never develops a capability in the first place, unlike deskilling where a capability existed and was lost through disuse. For junior SREs entering a field where AI already handles most incident response, the hands-on opportunities to build foundational intuition and muscle memory are vanishing before they ever form. _Teams designing onboarding for AI-heavy workflows can follow this debate on daily.dev._ ## Community take How the wider developer community reacted, aggregated from 3 discussions and 261 comments across hackernews (as of 2026-10-30). **TL;DR:** Much of the discussion sidesteps the AI-deskilling thesis itself and instead debates what SRE/DevOps actually means, while a smaller but substantive thread argues over whether aviation-style mandatory manual practice is a useful analogy or 'rent-seeking' theater, with some sharing real anecdotes of AI successfully resolving incidents. **Sentiment:** 10% positive · 55% mixed · 35% skeptical **The case for** - Some see deliberate human-practice incidents (modeled on FAA manual-flying mandates) as a sound way to preserve critical troubleshooting skills. - One engineer described AI (Claude) successfully root-causing a Postgres lock queue issue faster than they could have, suggesting AI assistance can be a genuine net positive. - Keeping developers on-call for systems they build is seen as a proven way to keep people genuinely engaged with how their AI-assisted code actually works. **The pushback** - Several argue the aviation analogy is overused or even 'rent-seeking,' doubting humans meaningfully outperform automation in rare disaster scenarios. - Others strongly rebut that view, saying autopilot handles only routine tasks and skilled pilots remain critical for the many failure modes automation can't cover. - Commenters note hiring and organizational incentives already favor people who know a narrow tool rather than foundational skills, which some say predates AI and will keep eroding expertise regardless. - Kubernetes and heavy cloud abstraction are blamed for already deskilling or boxing in infrastructure engineers independent of AI. **By community** - hackernews (mixed): The thread largely drifts into a long, contentious debate over what SRE/DevOps even means, with only a smaller side-thread directly engaging the AI-deskilling and aviation-analogy argument, split between skepticism and cautious agreement. **Hottest debate:** Whether the aviation manual-flying analogy is a legitimate safety lesson or just 'rent-seeking' theater, since some doubt humans actually outperform automation in rare emergencies while others insist skilled pilots remain essential. **Open questions** - Is there real evidence that AI-assisted incident response is causing measurable skill loss in software/SRE work, analogous to the cited pilot and endoscopist studies? - What would a practical 'deliberate inefficiency' or mandatory-practice policy look like for SRE teams in practice? - Does the deskilling risk apply broadly across engineering orgs, or mainly to teams that already over-abstracted their infrastructure (e.g., via Kubernetes)? **Highlights** > > "Just as the FAA mandates manual flying time even when the autopilot is perfectly capable, SRE teams can designate certain incidents, even the ones the AI could handle, as human-practice opportunities" This is a great example. Aviation is a perfect industry to learn from, they figured out a lot of things about how to keep humans from making mistakes. While complexity increases and automation takes away more and more tasks. > — [andix on hackernews · 8 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50306192) > Rent seeking has a specific definition and it fits here. When Autopilot does almost all the critical work needed (besides announcing frivolous stuff in carbon-based voice), and you have mandatory seats for humans to babysit the Autopilot mainly to satisfy some law, the term fits. I am not convinced humans can do much better in "disasters" than Autopilot, despite the emotional stories to the contrary (survivorship bias is one hell of a drug). > — [caaqil on hackernews · 2 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50306794) > This take is so ignorant and provably false. I can't tell if you're trying to ragebait or if you actually believe this. The autopilot does not do "almost all critical work", not even close. It only does some of the routine work (definitely not all of it). But the real critical work is when stuff goes wrong, dealing with emergencies. The inherent complexity of aviation means that there are so many different failure modes and combinations thereof that no traditional system could ever handle all possibilities and edge cases. I'm not going to claim that an AI could never do it. But as of right now, with current technology, well-trained pilots are absolutely critical to safety in even the most advanced airliners. Also, the survivorship bias argument runs against you. Most events where pilots save the day are completely invisible. Like catching an incorrect clearance, a misconfigured approach, dealing with a technical malfunction, etc. And even when disasters happen, it is very rare that simply engaging the autopilot would have saved the day. In fact, there are plenty of examples where the opposite is the case, and dropping to a lower level of automation would, in hindsight, have been better. > — [renehsz on hackernews · 1 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50307144) > This was just the default where I worked. We called the exercise Wheel of Misfortune: facilitator sets up an outage / bug in a non-prod environment (inspired by real events or not), spins a wheel, picks a victim, and the problem is solved collectively, manually. That's the standard format, but it could be much more freeform than that: the point is to educate each other regarding "incident management." I will say, I'd always been skeptical that AI could be better at incident management than an experienced engineer with deep domain / institutional knowledge, but I was recently proven wrong: Claude root-caused and helped resolve a Postgres lock queue pileup that I believe would have taken me much longer to fix. Re: aviation being a perfect industry to learn from, I think https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=5ESJH1NLMLs might be a good watch. I was introduced to this at a Wheel of Misfortune around 5 years ago, so it's interesting watching it today when AI is encroaching upon everything. > — [GlobalChubby on hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50307393) > Just like pilots, SREs will have to spend a minimum number of annual hours in the simulator to keep their skills sharp. > — [leecoursey on hackernews · 1 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50306546) **Source threads** - [hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50305693) · 317 points · 261 comments - [hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47220000) · 20 points · 0 comments - [hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47198990) · 4 points · 0 comments ## Similar posts on daily.dev - [Is AI ruining our skills? 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