AI isn't replacing SREs, it's deskilling them

Drawing on Lisanne Bainbridge's 1983 "Ironies of Automation" paper and emerging research on AI-induced deskilling in medicine and aviation, SigNoz argues that as AI handles routine incident response, SREs lose the practice that builds the intuition needed for novel outages, and junior SREs risk "never-skilling." The post proposes deliberate inefficiency (designating some incidents as human-practice opportunities) and human-in-the-loop rather than human-on-the-side designs, and describes SigNoz's plan to build an AI assistant that keeps humans in control.