AI Isn't Replacing SREs. It's Deskilling Them

Re:AI Isn't Replacing SREs. It's Deskilling Them by aleph_minus_one on Friday October 30, 2026 @12:42PM (#50306485)

> Ops is a specialized skillset completely orthog[o]nal to the business of building applications.

Exactly this was the idea: persons in a DevOps role have skills in both areas, i.e. are very wide skill set, so that one can assign them to very diverse tasks for more flexibility. Additionally, these persons can implement synergies to make things more efficient in areas that intersect both development and operation.

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Re:AI Isn't Replacing SREs. It's Deskilling Them by ragall on Friday October 30, 2026 @01:24PM (#50307173)

No, what you descrive is SRE. DevOps was the idea to give people that work 100% as developers the ability to do some amount of ops work (let say 5%), as a way to break the silo between Dev and Ops that existed in older organizations.

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Re:AI Isn't Replacing SREs. It's Deskilling Them by LargeWu on Friday October 30, 2026 @03:18PM (#50308894)

In practice though, at least at places I worked, it wasn't 5%, it was more like 80%.

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Re:AI Isn't Replacing SREs. It's Deskilling Them by ragall on Friday October 30, 2026 @07:20PM (#50311413)

For everyone ?

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Re:AI Isn't Replacing SREs. It's Deskilling Them by macintux on Friday October 30, 2026 @02:08PM (#50307880)

I am skeptical that either label is sufficiently well-defined and more importantly well-understood within the industry to offer definitive statements on the differences.

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Re:AI Isn't Replacing SREs. It's Deskilling Them by ragall on Friday October 30, 2026 @02:23PM (#50308118)

Of course it's misunderstood and misused, but that doesn't mean that more discerning people can't understand where it came from and why, and then used the term properly.

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