We had an interesting issue at work this past week. One of the developers flagged a problem that seemed to be network related. They had done all of the legwork to track it down, had some AI assistance to validate that the most likely problem was that we had some kind of network blocking in place, tried a few workarounds, and sent the details over to us when it seemed conclusive that it was a network issue. But the devops folks double checked locally, ran some tests from the same container that was having the issue, and everything was working just fine. It must be an error in the code. Initially the issue was stuck. Engineers thought it was a problem in infrastructure, infrastructure thought it was a problem in the code. Both were wrong as it turns out. It was the bug in Node 24.17.0 related to pooled socket reuse Luckily when I spotted the ticket I knew what it was right away. We were able to get things unblocked and zooming back along pretty quickly.
I didn’t think too much about it at the time. While I was out running a few days later it kept popping back into my head. What should we be doing when the normal AI debugging path isn’t enough? There are lots of people who would point to this example and claim that it demonstrates shortcomings of the current AI offerings. And there are lots of AI boosters who would counter that obviously the problem is that the debugging was done without giving the AI proper context to figure out the real problem. I think both of those points is correct to a degree.
As much as I love the idea of teaching an AI how to spot a pattern the way I do so that my entire organization can benefit from an insight instead of needing to replicate it, that same thought runs counter to most of what I know about how technical people actually get better at their role. We tend to learn more from the things we get wrong than we do from the things we get right. I’m not saying we should just blindly charge into bad ideas for the sake of learning. Rather that we shouldn’t disregard the value of sometimes working through the problem without having a pattern handed to us. Even if the problem we’re working on happens to be how to get the right context into an AI.
And you might also be wondering how I “knew what the problem was right away”. I’m not a Node person, I don’t tend to be up to date on the latest point release of every tool, I’m not hooked into the CVE stream in a way that would have plopped the issue on my radar either. I knew what it was cause I had been chatting with another engineer a few days earlier and they were griping about a Node update managing to slip through their blue-green release window and taking out a bunch of services. Just happened to stick in my head. That’s the other take away. Don’t forget the value of just talking to other smart people. It’s hard to know what the value will be, but it almost always shows up eventually.