CLOUDY MUSINGS

Everybody loves AI until the invoice shows up! Not the cute "we spent a few hundred dollars experimenting" invoice that gets hand-waved away as innovation spend. I mean the kind of invoice that makes finance suddenly become deeply curious about architecture decisions they previously considered engineering trivia, while product teams insist everything is still technically a pilot, and leadership starts asking whether we can "optimize this" as though that thought had just occur

I have watched some version of this play out enough times now that it almost feels like a rite of passage for organizations trying to mature their engineering operations. The symptoms are usually familiar. Incidents are happening too often, engineers are burned out, on-call has become something people dread, leadership wants fewer escalations, and somewhere in the middle of all that, someone says, “We need an SRE.” From there, a requisition gets approved, somebody smart gets