Here's an uncomfortable truth. If your production system pages you in the middle of the night for something an AI agent could fix, you've built a legacy system.
I don't care how many Helm charts you've written.
The On-Call Tax Is Technical Debt
We've accepted on-call rotations as an industry norm. "That's just ops." But think about what we're actually saying. We built systems so brittle that they require human intervention at random hours to stay alive.
That's not resilience. That's a design failure we've normalized.
Self-Healing Isn't New. Self-Reasoning Is.
Kubernetes has had self-healing basics for years. Restart crashed pods, reschedule workloads. But that's reactive. It waits for failure.
The shift happening now is predictive and autonomous.
AI agents detecting memory pressure 20 minutes before OOM kills. Systems correlating deploys with latency spikes and auto-rolling back. Agents resizing node pools on predicted traffic, not just current load.
This is running in production today.
The Hot Take
If you're hiring more SREs to handle incidents instead of building agents to prevent them, you're scaling your problems, not solving them.
The infrastructure teams that get this will run circles around those that don't. Not because they're bigger. Because they're building systems that learn.
Your 3am pages are a choice. Make a different one.
What's the most repetitive incident your team handles? That's where your first agent should live.
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