# Incident Management — Sylvain Kalache URL: https://www.sylvainkalache.com/topics/incident-management My writing, talks, podcasts, and projects about Incident Management. ## Writing on this site - [Can Claude fix itself? From no to maybe](https://www.sylvainkalache.com/blog/can-claude-fix-itself.md) (2026-09-24): An Anthropic engineer's answer shifted from no to maybe in six months. Three incidents show what Claude can investigate, fix, and still get wrong. - [AI handles incidents, engineers lose touch with their systems](https://www.sylvainkalache.com/blog/ai-handles-incidents-engineers-lose-touch-with-their-systems.md) (2026-09-04): AI-assisted incident response can lower MTTR while leaving engineers less prepared for the complex incidents automation cannot solve. ## Selected work - [LLMs Broke the SRE Runbook. Now What?](https://www.sylvainkalache.com/content/llms-broke-the-sre-runbook-now-what.md) (2025-11-05; The New Stack): AI-generated code is outpacing traditional runbooks. How SRE teams are adapting their incident response playbooks for the LLM era. - [From Vibes to Outages: Riding the AI Code Wave](https://www.sylvainkalache.com/content/from-vibes-to-outages-riding-the-ai-code-wave.md) (2025-10-08; SREcon EMEA 2025): AI-assisted coding is exploding — but acceleration doesn't mean reliability. Real examples of hard-to-trace LLM bugs, hallucinated dependencies, and operational fallout for lean SRE teams. - [Is AI-assisted coding an incident magnet?](https://www.sylvainkalache.com/content/is-ai-assisted-coding-an-incident-magnet.md) (2025-05-15; LeadDev): AI-generated code ships faster but introduces subtle bugs that are harder to trace. What engineering leaders need to know about the reliability trade-offs. - [AI Fails Like We Do](https://www.sylvainkalache.com/content/ai-fails-like-we-do.md) (2026-07-25; Engineering Futures): Sylvain Kalache went looking for the new ways AI breaks software. Every one turned out to be a habit we've had for years. - [Nir Soudry — Head of R&D at 7AI](https://www.sylvainkalache.com/content/nir-soudry-head-of-r-d-at-7ai.md) (2026-07-15; Humans of Reliability): AI vs. AI — how autonomous attackers are scaling phishing and malware, how defenders can use agents to cut alert noise, and where accountability belongs when AI investigates and remediates incidents. - [More Code, More Incidents? Staying Reliable When AI Writes the Code](https://www.sylvainkalache.com/content/more-code-more-incidents-staying-reliable-when-ai-writes-the-code.md) (2026-07-08; Incident Fest): Speaking on the Incident Fest Main Stage about staying reliable as AI-assisted development increases the rate at which software is created. - [Eran Kampf — VP of Engineering at Twingate](https://www.sylvainkalache.com/content/eran-kampf-vp-of-engineering-at-twingate.md) (2026-07-06; Humans of Reliability): Why Twingate stopped shipping features to rebuild reliability — from active-active multi-region architecture and smaller blast radiuses to preserving human ownership as agentic coding accelerates delivery. - [AIOps Summit](https://www.sylvainkalache.com/content/aiops-summit.md) (2026-06-23; AIOps Summit): Meta-hosted summit in Menlo Park focused on applying AI, LLMs, and agents to software incidents and response. - [Hamed Silatani — Co-Founder and CEO at Uptime Labs](https://www.sylvainkalache.com/content/hamed-silatani-co-founder-and-ceo-at-uptime-labs.md) (2026-05-28; Humans of Reliability): Every pilot trains for engine failure, but most engineers face their first major incident unprepared — why communication, coordination, and decision-making need deliberate simulation practice. - [The Science of On-Call Burnout: Why "How Are You Doing?" Always Gets "Fine"](https://www.sylvainkalache.com/content/the-science-of-on-call-burnout-why-how-are-you-doing-always-gets-fine.md) (2026-05-06; DevOpsDays Austin): Why traditional burnout detection fails in engineering teams. Connecting Maslach's burnout research and the Copenhagen Burnout Inventory to observable on-call metrics, and demonstrating that observed data outperforms subjective self-reporting. - [Gandhi Kumar — Principal Incident Commander at Twilio](https://www.sylvainkalache.com/content/gandhi-kumar-principal-incident-commander-at-twilio.md) (2026-04-28; Humans of Reliability): The golden hour — why the first 15 minutes of an incident decide everything, from mitigation strategy to customer trust, and why human psychology matters more than tools. - [Cliff Snyder — Senior SRE at Multimedia LLC](https://www.sylvainkalache.com/content/cliff-snyder-senior-sre-at-multimedia-llc.md) (2026-04-22; Humans of Reliability): From 600 to 6,000 — an 18-month transformation replacing legacy tooling with a purpose-built incident management platform, scaling operational responsibility from 600 SREs to 6,000 engineers across the org. - [Reliability Rebels Podcast — Guest Appearance](https://www.sylvainkalache.com/content/reliability-rebels-podcast-guest-appearance.md) (2026-04-08; Reliability Rebels): Reliability Rebels Guest appearance to discuss reliability engineering, AI, and modern incident response. - [How AI is Changing Incident Response (SRE Deep Dive)](https://www.sylvainkalache.com/content/how-ai-is-changing-incident-response-sre-deep-dive.md) (2026-03-28; The Rollback Café): From faster detection to smarter debugging — where AI delivers practical value in incident response, its limitations in production environments, and how teams can integrate AI while maintaining reliability standards. - [From Vibes to Outages: When AI Writes the Code You Debug](https://www.sylvainkalache.com/content/from-vibes-to-outages-when-ai-writes-the-code-you-debug.md) (2026-03-19; Conf42): LLM-assisted development introduces hard-to-trace bugs, AI-generated tests that mirror flawed logic, and hallucinated dependencies. Exploring operational consequences and actionable strategies from AI-powered incident tools to incident vibing. - [Will Wilson — CEO at Antithesis](https://www.sylvainkalache.com/content/will-wilson-ceo-at-antithesis.md) (2026-03-19; Humans of Reliability): The incident you never had — deterministic simulation testing, why conventional testing misses bugs that cause real outages, and how simulation-based approaches improve software reliability. - [Google SRE NYC Tech Talk — On-Call Health](https://www.sylvainkalache.com/content/google-sre-nyc-tech-talk-on-call-health.md) (2026-03-10; Google SRE NYC): The science behind responder overload and introducing On-Call Health, an open-source tool for detecting incident responder fatigue. At Google NYC Pier 57. - [Stephen Townshend — SRE Team Lead at isDown](https://www.sylvainkalache.com/content/stephen-townshend-sre-team-lead-at-isdown.md) (2026-03-04; Humans of Reliability): Burnout doesn't ask permission — the physiology of burnout from an incident responder's perspective, warning signs, recovery, and the systemic changes the industry must make. - [OpenClaw Demo Night w/ Rootly AI, Convex, Sentry & DigitalOcean](https://www.sylvainkalache.com/content/openclaw-demo-night-w-rootly-ai-convex-sentry-digitalocean.md) (2026-02-11; OpenClaw): An evening of AI demos and networking in Toronto — presenting Rootly AI alongside teams from Sentry, Red Brick Labs, Convex, and DigitalOcean. - [Dileshni Jayasinghe — VP of Technology at commonsku](https://www.sylvainkalache.com/content/dileshni-jayasinghe-vp-of-technology-at-commonsku.md) (2026-01-14; Humans of Reliability): Democratizing reliability — empowering non-engineers with operational power, incident management as a muscle, and AI-powered postmortems. - [MCPs and the Next Wave of Reliability w/ Rootly AI, WorkOS, Block, Microsoft & Groq](https://www.sylvainkalache.com/content/mcps-and-the-next-wave-of-reliability-w-rootly-ai-workos-block-microsoft-groq.md) (2025-08-28; Rootly AI Labs): Panel at the AWS GenAI Loft in San Francisco on MCPs, incident automation, observability, and generative AI tooling for reliability. - [AI Security Demo Night w/ Rootly AI, Okta, Panther, Tailscale & More](https://www.sylvainkalache.com/content/ai-security-demo-night-w-rootly-ai-okta-panther-tailscale-more.md) (2025-07-22; AI Security Demo Night): Live demos at Okta HQ in San Francisco — presenting Rootly AI alongside cybersecurity startups tackling identity, endpoint security, and threat response. - [Exploring AI's Role in Incident Management](https://www.sylvainkalache.com/content/exploring-ai-s-role-in-incident-management.md) (2025-06-30; Techstrong TV): Interview with Alan Shimel at PlatformCon NYC 2025 on how AI applies to incident management and reliability engineering — triage, root cause analysis, and why AI enhances rather than replaces engineers. - [Rootly Roundtable: From Weak Signals to Confident Fixes](https://www.sylvainkalache.com/content/rootly-roundtable-from-weak-signals-to-confident-fixes.md) (2025-06-18; Rootly): Invite-only roundtable on filtering alert noise, enriching alerts with automated ownership context, and streamlining bug validation workflows. - [Rootly Roundtable: Centralized vs. Distributed Incident Teams](https://www.sylvainkalache.com/content/rootly-roundtable-centralized-vs-distributed-incident-teams.md) (2025-05-07; Rootly): Invite-only roundtable comparing centralized specialist responders with distributed on-call models — which strategy works for your org. - [Incident Vibing: The Self-Healing System](https://www.sylvainkalache.com/content/incident-vibing-the-self-healing-system.md) (2025-04-23; Adventures in DevOps): Tracing the arc from ingesting logs at LinkedIn/SlideShare to LLM-driven RCA today. How fine-tuning, MCP, and incident vibing are reshaping SRE. - [Vibe Coding Is Here — But Are You Ready for Incident Vibing?](https://www.sylvainkalache.com/content/vibe-coding-is-here-but-are-you-ready-for-incident-vibing.md) (2025-03-19; The New Stack): If developers are vibe coding, SREs are now incident vibing. What happens when AI-generated code meets production reality. - [Dan Slimmon — Incident Response Trainer](https://www.sylvainkalache.com/content/dan-slimmon-incident-response-trainer.md) (2025-03-13; Humans of Reliability): Training teams for incident response — chaos engineering, game days, and building organizational muscle memory. - [Rootly Roundtable: The State of AI in Incident Management](https://www.sylvainkalache.com/content/rootly-roundtable-the-state-of-ai-in-incident-management.md) (2025-03-06; Rootly): Invite-only roundtable examining AI's role in incident response — separating practical applications from hype with industry leaders. - [Rootly-MCP-server](https://www.sylvainkalache.com/content/rootly-mcp-server.md) (2025-03-01; GitHub): An MCP server for Rootly — enabling AI agents to interact with incident management workflows via the Model Context Protocol. - [Sean Goedecke — Staff Software Engineer at GitHub](https://www.sylvainkalache.com/content/sean-goedecke-staff-software-engineer-at-github.md) (2025-02-18; Humans of Reliability): Reliability at GitHub scale — incident management, deployment practices, and engineering culture. - [SRE-skills-bench](https://www.sylvainkalache.com/content/sre-skills-bench.md) (2025-02-01; GitHub): A benchmark suite for evaluating AI agents on real-world SRE tasks — incident diagnosis, runbook execution, and infrastructure troubleshooting. - [On-Call-Health](https://www.sylvainkalache.com/content/on-call-health.md) (2024-06-01; GitHub): Detects early warning signs of on-call engineer burnout by pulling data from Rootly, PagerDuty, Linear, GitHub, and Slack. - [AI-Driven Incident Resolution — Hype or Reality](https://www.sylvainkalache.com/content/ai-driven-incident-resolution-hype-or-reality.md) (2024-05-01; DevOpsDays Austin): A grounded look at what LLMs can and can't do in an incident response workflow today, drawn from real production experiments at Rootly AI Labs. - [How DevOps Failed 60K Users](https://www.sylvainkalache.com/content/how-devops-failed-60k-users.md) (2016-06-23; Linux.com): A postmortem on a DevOps failure that affected 60,000 users — lessons in monitoring gaps, deployment practices, and incident response. [All work](https://www.sylvainkalache.com/index.md)