For years, Site Reliability Engineering, from what I understand, has been built around a simple idea: automate what can be automated, but be cautious about where trust is placed.
Production systems are valuable not because they’re difficult to operate, but because every decision has consequences. A small configuration mistake can become a customer-facing outage. A poorly timed deployment can impact thousands of users. Experience teaches engineers that production isn’t just another environment — it’s where judgment matters.
As AI becomes increasingly capable, many of us are beginning to ask the same question. Where does AI belong in production operations?
Some conversations immediately jump to autonomous incident response, automated remediation, or AI-driven deployments. While those ideas are exciting, I’ve found myself taking a much more conservative approach.
Instead of asking, “What can AI control?”, I started asking a different question:
