Tech Leaderism

AI and Critical Infrastructure

A Cloudflare outage this week following AWS disruptions just weeks ago. Two backbone providers and two significant incidents in a short time.

It raises questions about the evolving role of AI in critical infrastructure teams. As these tools become more capable, companies face pressure to optimize costs by reducing headcount, including senior engineering roles.

There's a meaningful distinction between using AI to augment technical teams versus replacing experienced staff entirely. Consumer applications can tolerate different risk profiles than infrastructure services where cascading failures affect millions of businesses simultaneously.

Senior engineers bring capabilities that extend beyond code: pattern recognition, institutional knowledge about system design decisions and the ability to navigate ambiguous emergencies under pressure. These skills develop over years.

The recent outages may be completely unrelated to staffing decisions, or they might be early signals. Either way, the conversation about balancing innovation with reliability in critical infrastructure deserves attention.