Fixing Claude with Claude: Anthropic reports on AI site reliability engineering

Summary

QCon London A member of Anthropic's AI reliability engineering team spoke at QCon London on why Claude excels at finding issues but still makes a poor substitute for a site reliability engineer (SRE), constantly mistaking correlation with causation. Alex Palcuie was formerly an SRE for Google Cloud Platform. "My job is keeping Claude up," Palcuie said, adding: "I've been using LLMs for actual incident response." Since January, he's been reaching for Claude before looking at other monitoring tools. Alex Palcuie speaks at QCon London 2026 His team is busy. "Claude goes down more often than any of us would like. Earlier today, I was involved in an incident, even if I'm at a conference." Is Palcuie automating himself out of a job? No, he said. "It would be hypocritical to say that Claude fixes everything. My team exists, we're hiring for many positions, this should show you that no, it doesn't work." However, he said "many of us would not be surprised" if it did work in future, and his talk demonstrated that AI is already helpful. Speaking of his career in incident response, Palcuie reflected that having engineers on call is "a tax on humans because our systems are not good enough to look after themselves." Palcuie spoke of the stress of being on call. "Your phone buzzes, there's half a second where you go from asleep, to incident commander mode... then at 9:00 am you show up at work and have to look professional and presentable." Incident response, he said, can loosely be broken down into a loop of four phases: observe, orient, decide, act. AI, he said, is fantastic for the observation part. "It reads the logs at the speed of I/O, it doesn't get bored, this at scale is something no human can match." He recounts a real incident when, on New Year's Eve, Claude Opus 4.5 was returning HTTP 500 errors. "I open Claude Code and ask it to have a look." The AI wrote a SQL query and "within seconds it has the answer, an unhandled exception in the image processing class." It post...