Comment by geoffbp
1 day ago
> Value is shifting to operations: deployment, testing, rollbacks, observability. You can't prompt 99.95% uptime on Black Friday. Neither can you prompt your way to keeping a site secure, updated, and running.
I agree somewhat but eventually these can be automated with AI as well.
Unless you replace the entire workforce, you'd be surprised how much organizational work and soft skills are involved in an infrastructure at scale.
Like sure, there is a bunch of stuff like monitoring, alerting that is telling us that a database is filling up it's disk. This is already automated. It could also have automated remediation with tech from the 2000s with some simple rule-based systems (so you can understand why those misbehaved, instead of entirely opaque systems that just do whatever).
The thing is though, very often the problem isn't the disk filling up or fixing that.
The problem is rather figuring out what silly misbehavior the devs introduced, if a PM had a strange idea they did not validate, if this is backed by a business case and warrants more storage, if your upstream software has a bug, or whatever else. And then more stuff happens and you need to open support cases with your cloud provider because they just broke their API to resize disks, ...
And don't even get me started on trying to organize access management with a minimally organized project consulting team. Some ADFS config resulting from that is the trivial part.
If "99.95% uptime on Black Friday", and "keeping a site secure, updated, and running" can ever be automated (by which I mean not a toy site and not relying on sheer luck), not only 99.99% of people in IT are out of a job, but humans as intelligent beings are done. This is such a doomsday scenario that there's not even a point in discussing it.
How? I am tired of these unfounded claims. Humans can’t even keep many sites secure.
Care to provide a prompt that leads to coding agent achieving 99.95% uptime on Black Friday as an example?