As a long-time observer of the SRE/DevOps tooling market, I look at the tsunami of AI-powered and LLM-enabled currently engulfing our industry like mo

LLMs won't save us

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2024-12-13 08:00:02

As a long-time observer of the SRE/DevOps tooling market, I look at the tsunami of AI-powered and LLM-enabled currently engulfing our industry like most great wave observers would: half in genuine wonder, and half in fear.

Every AI cliché you can think of is true. It has amazing abilities coupled with astonishing errors. Transformational effects on more or less everything; incredible - literally unbelievable - costs. Phenomenal cosmic powers; itty bitty living space.

There are a lot of companies trying to take this cosmic power and apply it everywhere. For a ton of consumer applications and a lot of business ones too, this combination of brilliant and broken works well, or certainly well enough. But the  infrastructure engineering and tooling market has some attributes that present a lot of problems for the successful adoption of AI. At this stage it’s not clear whether these attributes represent a fundamental obstacle to success, or merely a temporary speedbump, but there’s enough money, effort, and drive involved here to make for a fascinating attempt to find out.

Regardless, production engineering folks look at this push to apply LLMs to their domain - particularly incident management - and are, in the main, skeptical. (To be fair, we have to note the evident self-interest accompanying this skepticism, of which more later.) In essence, AI people are betting that the production engineering people are wrong about their skepticism. Given their superhuman performance in other domains I’m not so foolish as to predict failure indefinitely on the part of AI. There’s so many resources flooding the zone that success of some kind is almost inevitable.

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