Definition
Plain language
The engineering discipline of keeping large online services running reliably — the people who handle outages and on-call shifts.
As stated in the literature
Site Reliability Engineering — operating production systems with software-engineering methods, including incident response and postmortems; used in the Capability Paradox work as an unstructured operational domain where legitimacy must be inferred from narrative rather than from codified authorization protocols, which is why the capability paradox is sharpest there.
Also called: site reliability engineering
Why it matters: It keeps the online services people depend on running, and its reliance on judgment and narrative rather than rigid rules makes it an especially hard place for an agent to know what it's actually allowed to do.
For example, when a service goes down at 3 a.m., the on-call engineer diagnoses the outage, restores service, and later writes up what went wrong and how to prevent it.
Heard on the show
“In SRE, rank correlation around zero point eight.”Episode 058 — Why Upgrading Your AI Auditor to a Smarter Model Can Make Your System Less Safe