Site Reliability Engineering, 2nd Edition

Chapter 19. How AI Supports SRE

By Boris Arnoux, Chris Wasik, Clément Baïsse, Daniel Marshall, Ioannis Papapanagiotou, Ramón Medrano Llamas, Ruslan Meshenberg, Stevan Malesevic, Thomas Hubschman, and William Thurston

With Garrett Holthaus

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The integration of AI into Site Reliability Engineering is a fundamental shift in how we engineer, operate, and build production systems. However, discussing how AI is used in SRE presents a unique challenge: everything is changing so fast, it’s hard to write down anything we’re certain will stay true.

As we write this, many organizations report that increasingly large percentages of their new code is written by AI, and agents are beginning to autonomously navigate complex troubleshooting flows. Just a year ago, AI code generation was helpful but required significant human interaction. Two years ago, agentic tool use by language models was unreliable and brittle. It is likely that the next year will bring similarly large changes in AI capability and its ...