Latent Space: The AI Engineer Podcast
01:07:55 · Shawn Wang, Mihail Eric
[01:07:55] S0: Sure. Event based is usually a cron job that, like, surfaces an event, and then it's event based. But it's all crons. [01:08:02] S1: Yeah. Yeah. That's right. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. Or, yeah, like, webhooks or something like that. Yeah, that's absolutely right. Yes. And, you know, the technical term, of course, because at the end of the day, yeah, being sort of like a a person by by by trade and and, yeah, we we we call those things, and so I guess that's... I fall back on that terminology. [01:08:19] S0: Yeah. And have any AI SRE companies made an impression on you?
01:08:19 · Shawn Wang, Mihail Eric
[01:08:19] S0: Yeah. And have any AI SRE companies made an impression on you? [01:08:25] S1: So, okay. I mean, I think the Resolve folks are doing well there. Resolve is doing well. I would say Nightshift is also doing quite a good job there, in terms of broadly background agents. I'm a big fan of kind of... They're Greylock backed. I think they're doing doing real well in this area as well. Yeah. I I would say that where... I think SRE is an interesting use case, and this might... Back to the build versus buy question. I think what's interesting about it is, like, where do... When does it become... Like, where does an SRE, an AI SRE, like, really see the most value? It's typically when you have, like, a tremendous number of, like, service dependencies, and these, like, massive sort of, systems, and tons of Kubernetes and Helm files, like, you know, like, tremendously large Kubernetes infrastructure Helm that's, like, files kind of strewn everywhere around. I think that's why Resolve has done really well in, like, the enterprise, right, where you go and you sell to a Fort, you go and sell to, like, a Walmart, and you kind of say, hey, you have... Your service level dependencies are crazy. And you see these these, like, you know, these diagrams of how things are set up. Then And they kinda go in and they're like, we'll we'll we'll try and make sense of all of this. I think that, like, at at smaller scales, it's usually still manageable that you can kinda roll your own. But, you know, I will say that for the enterprise, think they've they've done a good job.
01:09:33 · Shawn Wang, Mihail Eric
[01:09:33] S0: Yeah. For for people who I have never worked at this scale, because it it took me a while to to to see this, it is on the order of, let's let's call it tens of thousands of repos, more repos than developers. These are the situations where, like, you don't know what code is running That's absolutely anywhere in the company because probably the guy I wrote is no longer here. Right? That's absurd. By the way, it's still load bearing. [01:09:55] S1: That's absurd. Yeah, that's the scariest thing. That's absolutely right. And then you're the person who's on call, and you're interacting with a system that goes down where that person still isn't there, and there's like old out of date runbooks, you're like, what the hell is going on here? It's a scary, scary thing. And yes, at the enterprise level, it's a whole different beast. [01:10:16] S0: Yeah. So kind of college hacker, one person per repo, they've never... Totally. No appreciation. But I think if you just give that idea, you drop them in a simulation of, okay, day one on your job, this happens, what now?
01:10:16 · Shawn Wang, Mihail Eric, S2
[01:10:16] S0: Yeah. So kind of college hacker, one person per repo, they've never... Totally. No appreciation. But I think if you just give that idea, you drop them in a simulation of, okay, day one on your job, this happens, what now? [01:10:32] S1: Yeah. Yeah. So another shout out I'll give here. So the Resolve folks, actually last year, they made an assignment for the class where they effectively created a sandbox for students to go and then the sandbox was like strewn... I mean, within the sandbox, there was, like, many many services that were doing their various things, and there was even, like, bugs in the services within that sandbox. And then as part of the assignment, the students had to, like, go and actually, like, use the Resolve agent and kind of, like, probe and play the the human on call person probing the system, discovering what's happening. [01:11:07] S2: They've gotten interesting. [01:11:08] S0: Yeah. Yeah. It's an interesting website. [01:11:09] S1: I do not. It's been a while Yeah. Since I've seen [01:11:12] S0: This is very interactive. Okay. They're being a PagerDuty now. [01:11:17] S1: Yeah. Checks But also this, like, this video, I was... [01:11:21] S2: You know, you were shouting out. Interesting. Interesting. But okay.
01:11:21 · S2, Shawn Wang, Mihail Eric
[01:11:21] S2: You know, you were shouting out. Interesting. Interesting. But okay. [01:11:25] S0: Yeah. Is it... So... Okay. We, you know, we never get a chance to talk about this side of the world except for conversations like this. Any other segments? Because I I think AI SRE is maybe too broad or even too narrow, depending how you look at it. Right? Like, too broad meaning, well, there's there's several subdivisions of AI. Sorry. That's interesting. Mhmm. Or too narrow being like, well, actually, that's not even the biggest problem that we have. Mhmm. So I take it however you like. [01:11:48] S1: Yeah. You mean, like, specifically for for, like, Monaco or just, like, broadly for, like, organizations thinking about this? [01:11:53] S0: Broadly, because that is our audience.
01:11:53 · Shawn Wang, Mihail Eric
[01:11:53] S0: Broadly, because that is our audience. [01:11:56] S1: Mhmm. Take a look at that. Yeah. I think that, again, it's function of how we just scale. Right? And I think that for the enterprise, there are a number of issues that aren't always I almost feel like the answer is not even always just more agents, and and since we're still actually on the week five agent ready code bases, like, I talk to companies of, like, a certain scale, the the things that are holding them back are really more just, like, low level DevOps, CICD stuff, right? Their merge queues are getting backed up. It takes too long to stand up an app. There's just actually more foundational things that have almost nothing to do with, that throwing in one more SRE bot, or a la a bot wouldn't be the answer to the problem, because there's more systemic things that they need to figure out. And so... So that brings us to [01:12:38] S0: the week six.