Coding agents vs SRE agents are different beasts
Coding agents and “AI SRE” are both agents, but they’re fundamentally different beasts.
A coding agent goes deep. It has to handle infinite types of requests (add feature X) against one context: your repo. An SRE agent goes wide. Finite types of asks (why is X down?), but the context sprawls across everything you run.
And that width is where the pain lives. To diagnose an issue:
- Your K8s cluster isn’t useful without your logs.
- Your logs aren’t as useful without your metrics.
- Your metrics aren’t as useful without your alerts.
Break that chain of context and the agent goes blind.
Which is why the question I get most isn’t about accuracy or speed. It’s: “What integrations do you need?”
That’s the right question. The answer determines whether an agent is useful on day one or needs months of setup before it can do anything meaningful.