You build it, you run it. Fifteen years of SRE gospel, and almost nobody questions it. The rule was never about writing code. It was about a loop. Whoever wrote it understands it, so whoever wrote it carries the pager. Understanding was the point. The pager was just enforcement. Agents cut that loop. The code still ships. The author is gone. I take the assumption apart, one joint at a time. No human author, so who holds the pager. Nobody who can explain it, so the author cannot answer the 3am question. Review cannot keep up with the output, so your gate is a rubber stamp. Then the fixes that do not work, and why each one folds. Human in the loop. Make the agent better. Keep agent code out of prod. Then the reframe. If writing it no longer means understanding it, reliability has to come from somewhere else. Operability stops being something you hope the author cared about, and becomes something you check for. One real incident carries the argument. A single S3 copy call, a 5 GiB limit nobody checked, a migration that never sealed, and a cluster crash-looping while the log line said migrating objects: <nil>. None of it was hard. Nobody could see it. The principle is not dead. The assumption under it is.
Itamar Knafo is the co-founder and CEO of Dalton AI. Previously, has spent five years building and leading software, DevOps, observability, and operations teams. He is a hands-on engineer with a deep background of cloud infrastructure, and open source, and now focuses on applying AI to production engineering.
