Most SRE agents only do half of the job: they wait for an incident to occur, then hand off diagnostics. While that’s better than nothing, it stops short of resolving the incident. The flipside is that no one actually wants an agent to autonomously resolve incidents if it can only deliver 90% of the time. That would mean for the other 10%, the agent has made the wrong call on business-impacting systems, exacerbating conditions and making a postmortem more difficult to conduct. While coding agents are allowed to act autonomously since bad output can be caught in review, incident response doesn’t have that luxury, leaving SRE agents to watch instead of act. This talk covers the limitations of bleeding-edge incident response agents, and provides a roadmap toward trustworthy, verified, and independent agent playbooks. Playbooks require agents to show their work to an independent oracle that judges whether the case they’ve made is plausible or flimsy. Only once a check passes does the agent move to the next step in the playbook, with each step gating the tools it's allowed to touch. What you end up with is your existing runbook turned into a state machine, where every transition locks down what the agent can do next. I'll walk through the architecture, what actually counts as evidence to a judge, as well as the weaknesses of this approach.
Robbie McKinstry is the founder and CEO of Wack where he’s building MultiTool, an observability tool that provides intelligent, thresholdless alerts on top of your existing telemetry. Before MultiTool Robbie was on the OSS core team at Pulumi, and before that an early employee and research scientist in HashiCorp's office of the CTO. His career has focused on taking hard ideas off paper and turning them into usable developer tools.
