Skills that you need come and go. I owned a commodore 64 once and knew how to use it. All gone. I fired up an emulator a few years ago and then had a big "now what moment" where I realized I had no clue what to do with it. I had a vague memory of inserting tapes and issuing commands to load stuff from it. Function keys were important. And there was a manual I once had that explained it all. But no muscle memory. Nothing. I'm sure I could have figured it out eventually. Same with DOS. It's decades ago since I did anything on a DOS command line. All gone.

This doesn't matter. That stuff belongs in a museum. I've used AWS pretty extensively a few years ago. I switched to gcloud and other providers later. At some point in the last year, I started delegating all of the pesky work of interfacing with that stuff to AI. It's amazing. I've always referred to AWS documentation as a maze of misdirection. Just endless amounts of documentation mixed with marketing pages that are completely useless. All links lead back to those. So you are constantly fighting their marketing people to get at the bit you actually want which is a mess of fragmented reference documentation with parameters, endpoints, etc. Staying on top of that and keeping it in your head is a skill that will atrophy that I never cared about.

AI is great for figuring out micro detail like that. It's also great for coming up with a bigger plan that involves stringing together lots of tools, commands, scripts, and what not to execute a high level goal of "I want to run this thing over there". And with a bit of work you can actually do this the right way as well. It's fine. I never really liked devops to begin with. I can do it and I appreciate it done properly and can tell the difference. But I've always hated how it sucked up my time when what I really wanted to do was move our product forward. Instead of which I ended up dealing with a lot of arcane AWS or whatever crap that just needed dealing with. And there's always more of it. Just endless amount of micro detail. AI is great for getting on top of that.

> skill atrophy is real

It is also both a choice and avoidable.

Atrophy happens when you trade understanding for productivity. Productivity benefits your employer and your KPIs, but not your understanding and your opportunities going forward.

Understanding used to be an unavoidable of the exploration process, and writing documentation used to be the thing that never got done. Now, writing documentation is automatic, but reading it still isn't.

I've been managing a team of interns at my last job, and as they were all equipped with coding agents, they'd deliver complete solutions to problems once or several times per day that would normally take days, or weeks if you factor in necessary learning.

As review of their understanding, and for the sake of my own cognitive debt, I would first ask them the question "How does it work?" and they usually couldn't answer. After a handful of tasks, they started preparing answers. This forth-and-back is still more shallow than getting the deep knowledge chiseled through hours of trial and error, debugging and wrong directions. Spending two hours to find a problem to realize you forgot to save or upload a file, or had an x instead of a y. I look back with nostalgia, and I wonder if there weren't always better ways, and we just get to pick them now. I can literally convert any task, solved or not, into a quiz that brings me towards understanding, in rainbow-colored pig latin.

The way I think about this -- AI makes all of us managers. We need to figure out when we are convinced by what is brought in front of us, when to ask to do more checks/validation, when to fully reject, when to accept. To do this properly we need to have to have enough background knowledge to evaluate the what is AI brings, otherwise otherwise a person in the loop is simply not needed if they only type a prompt and always click yes.

I think people indeed need to constantly practice our low level skills, otherwise they will atrophy.

But there's a new skill blossoming there, right? That's what I'm noticing. The atrophying skill is one you don't need anymore. The new one - prompting, routing the output, spotting the hallucinations, managing singal/noise etc. - is now where you can add tremendous value.

To say nothing of being bold enough to run systems like that in the first place. I know some of engineers that are still folding their arms and refusing to engage with AI!

I used to scour through server logs, build logs, test reports etc to figure out why tests were failing in CI. That was exhausting work and could take days of investigation. Now I get the exact root cause in a couple of minutes. Just had to give LLMs a token to call Jenkins API and it knows how to do the rest. What an unbelievable experience. Never ever thought computers would be able to do this in my lifetime.

AWS CLI‘s API surface is huge, it’s all of AWS. You can abstract over that with your own tools. Agents are great at these little greenfield scripts, both building and using them.

Velocity is sought because we lost traction. If you can effect your designs in few actions, speed has nothing on intention.

> I dunno wtf is gonna happen.

me either but i do know it will happen sooner than i expect

>> I will never be able to use AWS CLI as well as claude does.

Are you sure that it's superhuman; and not super -you- man?

You may never be as fast, but you should absolutely feel at least hypothetically capable of using the CLI at least as well. Or just.. Reading docs and understanding patterns or interfaces was never a superhuman skill and it still isn't. You are a lot more capable than you probably think!

And I am not just trying to platitude you here. Without that basic confidence everything ends up just eventually being harder with the AI, even if maybe the feedback and loop of it all feels faster.

I’m doing interviews as a senior sre and frankly it’s extremely weird.

I’m being asked very open ended scenario-based questions, I’m answering honestly, and it seems to be going well (i’m moving through the interview funnel).

I’m not getting asked deeply technical questions. No weird obscure trivia. No stack-specific things. No linux internals. No weird networking trap questions. Coding part is essentially gone.

My interviewers so far have mostly been other senior SREs.

It looks like a market where a senior sre can recognise another senior sre. Some kind of closed circle.

So weird, so so weird.