The future of software engineering is SRE

The future of software engineering is SRE

This post made the rounds recently, landing on the front page of Hacker News and all over my Twitter “For You” feed. It articulated some of the same feelings I’ve been having lately but haven’t been able to put into words.

When code gets cheap operational excellence wins.

This line stuck with me.

The genie is out of the bottle. People are going to be writing code at an unprecedented scale with AI agents and we’re already seeing the downsides. Several notable open source projects such as Ghostty, Node.js, curl, tldraw have limited or shut down external contributions after being inundated with AI generated PRs.

This begs the question, how do we gain confidence this AI generated code “works”?

To me, this is fundamentally ops work. The real problem is “confidence” is subjective. It’s not about 100% test coverage, it’s the feeling when I ship this, everything is going to be okay.

If a company has a reliable CI/CD pipeline, strong observability, and safe rollback procedures, it almost doesn’t matter where the code came from. Human. AI. Intern. Vendor. What matters is whether the product can safely absorb change.

So lets bring back ops pride and get ready for software engineering in this new era.