Technology Overviews
Herdr: how to supervise coding agents
Herdr keeps coding agents visible and their terminals persistent. Here is how to evaluate its status signals, recovery behavior, and place in SRE work.
Commentary
Nate’s take on AI in production, reliability metrics, and how engineering teams work.
AIOps
Production agents: authorize the action, then verify the outcome
Define production-agent authority, reconcile uncertain writes, verify outcomes independently, and use an execution contract before expanding scope.
AIOps
AI token usage: plan for cost, latency, and context limits
Measure tokens per completed task, account for retries and tool output, and preserve the evidence an operational assistant needs.
AIOps
GPU capacity depends on power and cooling
When inference slows without obvious application errors, test physical constraints alongside queueing, workload changes, and software regressions.
AIOps
Evaluate Claude Opus 4.6 for operational work
Test evidence retrieval, long-session consistency, tool boundaries, and cost before letting a model influence production changes.
AIOps
Agent skills for SRE: write the execution contract
Define inputs, permissions, idempotency, verification, and stop conditions for one operational capability before expanding its authority.
AIOps
From AIOps signals to agent actions: design the handoff
Decide which workflow deserves an agent, where a fixed automation is sufficient, and how to measure the work left for responders.
AIOps
Sustainable on-call: make workload relief change the plan
Connect on-call interruptions, specialist demand, and recovery work to a concrete capacity decision using an on-call workload worksheet.
AIOps
Release gates that hold up under incident pressure
Turn reliability policy into a release decision with fresh evidence, limited exceptions, and a clear path to resuming normal changes.
AIOps
NetApp and NVIDIA: evaluate the storage path behind AI workloads
Read validated architectures as a starting point for workload, recovery, and support testing, not a promise of automatic reliability.
AIOps
AIOps market size: read the forecast before using it
Check market definitions, forecast periods, and growth arithmetic before turning a market estimate into an operational investment case.
SRE
Error-budget policy: agree on the decision before the outage
Connect an SLO’s allowance to planning and release behavior, with explicit ownership, exceptions, and treatment of measurement gaps.