'Comprehension Debt': The Argument That AI Incident Response Will Cut Mean Resolution Time While Raising It for Complex Incidents
Published 2026-09-04 and reaching 411 points with 341 comments, this piece applies Lisanne Bainbridge's 1983 'Ironies of Automation' to AI-driven incident response, arguing that automating routine incidents removes exactly the practice engineers need for novel failures. The aviation analogy is concrete: modern turbine engines see fewer than one in-flight shutdown per 100,000 engine flight hours, yet pilots still drill the rare cases, and TransAsia Flight 235 shows what misidentification costs when the crew had 117 seconds. The author, who works on incident simulation with Rootly and Uptime Labs, predicts average resolution times improve while complex-incident resolution times get worse as the gap widens between how systems work and what responders understand.
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