AI handles incidents, engineers lose touch with their systems

In his latest blog post, Sylvain Kalache explores the growing reliance on AI-driven incident management tools in modern software engineering. While these automated systems significantly reduce the time spent on manual troubleshooting and alert fatigue, Kalache warns of a critical trade-off: engineers are increasingly losing their deep, intuitive understanding of the underlying infrastructure. As AI agents take over the responsibility of diagnosing and resolving system failures, the human expertise required to debug complex, non-standard issues risks atrophy. The author argues that while automation is essential for scaling operations, organizations must implement strategies to ensure that engineers remain engaged with the system architecture. Without intentional effort to maintain technical literacy and hands-on experience, teams may find themselves unable to intervene effectively when AI tools fail or encounter novel, high-stakes incidents that fall outside their training data.