My SREcon talk is now up.

The role of a Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) is evolving. The focus has shifted from simply working harder during an outage; A new kind of teammate is here to help: the SRE Agent.

But what are the key differences when you compare an SRE agent versus a traditional site reliability engineer? This isn’t just a superficial change. It signifies a fundamental alteration in how teams construct and sustain dependable services.

Scope of work: Direct intervention vs. autonomous action.

A traditional SRE: Does the work hands-on. 

• The process: An alert fires, they log in, run diagnostics, and apply fixes. They write automation, but they are the ones who run and oversee it. The work is guided by runbooks, which they either follow or improve.

An SRE Agent: Acts on its own. 

• The process: The agent doesn’t just run a script. It gets an alert, understands the context, and executes a series of actions to solve the problem. Think of it as a direct report for routine incidents. It handles the tedious tasks, letting you resolve incidents faster with an SRE Agent.

Problem-solving: Human experience vs. data correlation.

A traditional SRE: Relies heavily on experience. That “I’ve seen this before” moment. They connect dots based on past outages and knowledge of the system. Powerful, but it doesn’t scale. Caveat: it’s a huge risk if your experienced team or person is unavailable.

An SRE Agent: Uses data. An agent processes vast amounts of information in seconds. This can include telemetry, incident histories, recent code changes, and alerts from every system. It’s about recognizing probabilities and patterns on a massive scale, rather than relying on intuition. That’s one reason memory is so important. We found that when we built an SRE Agent with memory, it transformed incident response.

Speed and scale: Human pace vs. machine speed.

A traditional SRE: Human. They need sleep and get tired, and are prone to risk with manual processes. An alert at 3 a.m. might be handled by a groggy engineer. Their alertness and availability directly affect MTTR.

An SRE Agent: Operates 24/7 at full capacity. It doesn’t run the risk of getting tired or making mistakes from fatigue. It can run diagnostics and apply fixes in milliseconds, rather than minutes. This directly reduces MTTR for common incidents and scales your operations from human pace to machine speed.

Toil management: Reduction vs. elimination.

A traditional SRE: Works to reduce toil. A core SRE principle is to minimize ‌manual, repetitive work that provides no lasting value. A lot of time goes into scripting these tasks, yet someone often still needs to start them or watch them.

An SRE Agent: Works to eliminate entire classes of toil. Instead of writing a script to restart a service, the agent does it when it detects the need (or is alerted). That’s the difference between making a task easier and delegating it entirely. This is the heart of The Agentic SRE Vision, where the agent acts as a member of the team.

Daily focus: Reactive fixes vs. proactive strategy.

A traditional SRE: Is often stuck in a reactive loop. A large part of their day is spent firefighting, which leaves little time for the “engineering” part of their job that improves system reliability.

An SRE Agent: Changes the team’s focus. Automating incident response allows SREs to focus on critical tasks like system resilience, observability enhancements, and future planning. The role shifts from “system fixer” to “system architect,” transforming the incident lifecycle with AI agents.

Skill set: Technical depth vs. context engineering.

A traditional SRE: Needs deep technical knowledge of specific systems, scripting languages like Python, and infrastructure tools to be successful.

An SRE Agent: Shifts the human’s role to context engineering. You teach the AI agent about your environment by answering questions like:

• What tools can it use, like kubectl. 
• What are the service dependencies? 
• Which actions are safe to take without approval? 

The job becomes less about running the commands and more about defining the guardrails for the agent.

The human role: Total ownership vs. strategic oversight.

A traditional SRE: Owns the problem. They carry the stress and responsibility from the first alert to the final postmortem.

An SRE Agent: Makes the engineer’s role one of oversight. You become the manager and strategist. You review the agent’s work, handle escalations for new or complex problems, and refine its logic over time. The agent takes the first hit. The human provides the final judgment. 

The new SRE: Shifting from doer to strategic leader.

SRE agents augment your capabilities; they do not replace human team members. By delegating routine incident response to your new digital teammates, you elevate the department. You transition engineers from  tactical doers into  strategic leaders who design, manage, and   an automated workforce. 

The SRE of the future focuses on high-impact work:

• Architecting reliability: You design resilient systems from the ground up and engineer the sophisticated, automated responses to manage them.
  
• Managing a digital workforce: You oversee, train, and refine your team of AI agents, continuously improving their effectiveness and expanding their capabilities.
  
• Solving novel problems: You apply your deep domain expertise to tackle ‌complex, high-stakes incidents that automation cannot resolve alone.
  
• Driving innovation: You reinvest the time reclaimed from toil into long-term reliability initiatives, proactive system improvements, and business-critical feature development.
  

The future is human-managed, not just human-powered.

The goal is elevation, not replacement. The shift moves from a reactive, human-centric model that burns people out to a proactive, human-managed one that scales with your business. 

The SRE agent handles the noise, the toil, and the first-pass analysis, making the SRE role more strategic and ultimately more sustainable.

Engineering leaders who invest in agent-assisted operations spend less time reacting and more time building. 

For teams ready to take the next step, how to choose an AI SRE solution is a strong starting point

The post SRE agent vs. traditional engineer: 7 key differences appeared first on PagerDuty.

It's a good time to be in the market for a MacBook, between the affordability of the MacBook Neo, the power of the M5 Pro and M5 Max MacBook Pros, and the all-around appeal of the M5 MacBook Air. But Apple's desktop computers are another story, and not just because they're all about due for their own M5 upgrades.

Over the last few months, the Mac mini and the Mac Studio have gradually become harder to buy. The 512GB M3 Ultra Mac Studio was removed from Apple's website, and other models of both desktops have seen their ship times slip from days to weeks to months. In the last couple of weeks, several other configurations of Mac mini and Studio have begun showing up as "currently unavailable" on Apple's website, which virtually never happens even when Apple is planning an imminent hardware refresh.

This week (as spotted by MacRumors), the baseline $599 M4 Mac mini, which offers 16GB of RAM and 256GB of storage, earned the "currently unavailable" label for the first time.

You can still place orders for most Mac mini models. An M4 Mac mini with 512GB or more of storage and either 16 or 24GB of RAM will take between 5 and 12 weeks to arrive, depending on the specific configuration you buy. M4 Pro Mac minis with any storage configuration and either 24GB or 48GB of RAM will take a similar amount of time to arrive, with most models showing availability within 10 to 12 weeks.

All M4 Mac minis with 256GB of storage, all M4 minis with 32GB of RAM, and all M4 Pro Mac minis with 64GB of RAM are listed as "currently unavailable." Mac Studio models with 128GB or 256GB of RAM are also listed as "currently unavailable." Other Studio configurations list the same five- to 12-week wait times as the minis.

This does not seem to be an issue specific to the M4 chip generation; most M4 iMac configurations, including those with 32GB of RAM, will arrive at your door within a week or two of being ordered. It's also not being caused exclusively by ongoing RAM and shortage storages—new MacBook Pros with 128GB of RAM and large SSDs will arrive within two or three weeks of being ordered.

The stock situation for the Mac mini and Studio is also different from the longer-than-usual ship times affecting the MacBook Neo. The Neo's popularity pushed its ship times on Apple's website into the two- to three-week range shortly after it went on sale. But the shipping window has also stayed within that two-to-three-week range through all of March and April rather than slipping further. And the Neo is still readily available from third-party retailers like Amazon and Best Buy; most Mac mini and Mac Studio configurations are also sold out on these third-party sites.

Why the delays?

So why are these Macs, specifically, becoming so difficult to buy? It's likely a confluence of factors.

The main one is that, again, we're expecting refreshes for all of this hardware later this year, based on reporting from people with reliable track records. Historically, slipping ship times have been a pretty good indicator that a refresh is coming soon, as Apple winds down manufacturing for one device and ramps up production for another. Apple usually tries to limit the amount of manufactured-but-unsold inventory in its retail channels, at least partly because it doesn't want to have tons of outdated stock on hand when it decides to update its hardware.

This "pretty normal for Apple" situation is likely being compounded by the ongoing AI craze. Data center demand for RAM and storage chips is one aspect; the other is that the Mac mini and Studio are both fast and cost-effective options for people trying to run locally hosted AI agents like OpenClaw. This is partly because of Apple Silicon's unified memory architecture, which gives both CPU and GPU access to a 16GB-or-larger pool of RAM; Apple's hardware is also generally faster and more power-efficient than similarly priced mini PCs.

Whatever the reason for the current shortages, we'd advise holding off on any Mac desktop purchase for now if you can. Based on the availability of Apple's other Macs, iPads, and iPhones, we'd expect the stock situation to improve soon after new models are introduced. The biggest question is whether these updates are imminent or if we'll be stuck waiting until this summer or fall.

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Here’s a recent comment on LinkedIn from John Allspaw, on a post by Gandhi Mathi Nathan Kumar about availability.

Allspaw’s comment is a succinct description of a safety model proposed by the Danish resilience engineering researcher Erik Hollnagel: Safety-II. Hollnagel has described Safety-II in his book Safety-I and Safety-II: The Past and Future of Safety Management, as well as in white papers aimed at aviation and medical audiences. The book and white papers are all quite approachable, and I recommend checking them out.

Hollnagel’s observation is simultaneously trite and surprising: most of the time our systems are succeeding; incidents are the exception, not the norm. After all, this is why we measure availability in nines. The traditional approach to safety, what Hollnagel calls Safety-I, is to try to reduce the bad stuff, the work that leads to incidents. Hollnagel asks us to think about things differently: what if, instead, we focused on cultivating the good stuff: the everyday work that is consistently preventing accidents? There’s a lot more good stuff happening than bad stuff! Or, as my former colleague Ryan Kitchens put it, instead of asking why do things go wrong, it’s more productive to ask how do things go right?

In Hollnagel’s Safety-II model, the normal work that people in your organization do everyday is actively creating safety. Or, as the American organizational psychologist Karl Weick put it in his 1987 paper Organizational culture as a source of high reliability, reliability is a dynamic non-event. That is, the work is explicitly positive, and by the nature of this work, people are constantly doing work that is preventing incidents from happening. However, this work isn’t able to prevent all incidents, which is why they still happen. But taking Safety-II seriously means trying to understand how it is that normal work prevented previous incidents, rather than just trying to understand how it failed to prevent the last one. In Hollnagel’s words, the purpose of an investigation is to understand how things usually go right as a basis for explaining how things occasionally go wrong.

Focusing on the scenarios where things go right is a radical reframing of the problem, so much so that it is a genuinely strange idea, something that violates our intuitions about how systems break. We operate under a baseline, unspoken assumption that reliability is a passive thing, that the default behavior of a system is to stay up, and that somebody needs to actively do something wrong in order to cause the system to break. In other words, we view the day-to-day work people in the system do as a potential threat to reliability. And then, when an incident happens, we try to identify the bad work that broke the system.

If we were to take Safety-II seriously, we’d have to focus on how people adapt their work. It means seeing that people change how they do their work based on the pressures that they are currently facing and the constraints that they are under. More importantly, it means that we have to acknowledge that these adaptations are usually successful. If you only look at these adaptation within the context of an incident, and try to improve reliability by preventing these adaptations, it’s like believing you can figure out how to win the lottery by examining the behaviors of lottery winners. Sure, you can identify patterns among the behavior of lottery winners. But there are even more folks who lose the lottery who exhibit those behaviors, you’re just not looking at those. Note, though, how much this goes against the way people think about how incidents happen.

Safety-II is also challenging to adopt because organizations are simply not used to studying the normal work that goes on in an organization in order to answer the question, “what work is going particularly well, and how can we do more of it?” The closest we probably get is shadowing that happens when new employees join. We do have developer experience surveys, but those focus specifically on problems with existing tooling. I don’t know of any reliability organization at any tech company out there that takes a Safety-II approach and spends time understanding what’s happening when it looks like there’s nothing happening. Perhaps they’re out there, but if they are, they aren’t writing about this work. The one exception to this is the resilience in software folks, but even with us, we’re generally focused on shifting the emphasis of post-incident examination of work, rather than examining work outside of the context of incidents.

Now, attention is a limited resource in an organization, and incidents win the attention of an organization because they are troubling by their nature. Because attention is limited, if all the indicators are currently green, that’s taken as a sign that we can safely spend our attention budget elsewhere. In the tech industry, we also don’t have great models for how to study normal work within an organization, because nobody seems to be doing it. Or, if they are, they aren’t writing about it. In his Safety-II book, Hollnagel recommends doing interviews and field observations. In tech, field observations are trickier because the majority of our work is effectively invisible; we do our work alone at a computer. We can observe interactions over channels like Slack and Zoom, but that’s only part of the story. I suspect that interviews are our best potential source of information here. And then we need to take what we’ve learned from the interviews and use those insights to improve reliability by amplifying what’s already working well. That’s not something we have experience with.

It’s no surprise, then, that Safety-II hasn’t caught on our field. It cuts against our intuitions about the nature of complex systems failure, and we don’t have good public examples to work from about this. We resilience in software folks are trying to push the industry in this direction with trying to get people to think differently about what we can get out of incident analysis, and that’s probably our best bet right now. But we have a long way to go.

• What's new: The 2026 Honda Accord carries over largely unchanged from 2025.
• Why it matters: The Accord's roomy interior and large trunk make it as family friendly as ever.
• Edmunds says: The Accord still lacks a sporty engine option, which its awesome chassis deserves.

The 2026 Honda Accord remains a real heavyweight in the realm of midsize sedans. It boasts a fantastic blend of comfort, style, efficiency and driving dynamics that are still hard to match in an SUV without spending a lot more money. Sedans in general are becoming rarer with every passing year, but the Accord soldiers on in quiet excellence nevertheless.

Read all our 2026 Honda Accord content:

• 2026 Honda Accord: Specs and Features
• 2026 Honda Accord: Trim Comparison
• 2026 Honda Accord: MPG and Gas Mileage Data

Overall Score: 8.3/10

The 2026 Honda Accord's score places it right in line with its chief rival, the 2026 Toyota Camry. We love the Honda's clean design, less busy interior and excellent ride.

How does the Honda Accord drive?

Driving experience: 8/10

The Accord Sport-L, with its hybrid powertrain, maximizes fuel efficiency without sacrificing performance. In our testing, the Accord-L dashed from 0 to 60 mph in 7 seconds, about 1 second quicker than most rival midsize hybrids. Our test car came with 19-inch wheels yet still offered a wonderful and comfortable ride, easily soaking up major bumps and bruises without issue. The EX-L trim, with its smaller wheels, should be even better. The thin windshield pillars and huge rear window offer plenty of visibility and add to driver confidence.

The Honda Sensing collection of driving aids is well sorted, although the lane keeping system can be overly intrusive at times. We appreciated the ease of activating adaptive cruise control with just a simple press of a button on the steering wheel.

Is the Honda Accord comfortable?

Comfort: 7.8/10

The Accord's big door openings make getting in and out a breeze, although taller rear passengers may need to duck slightly to clear the sloping roofline. Headroom in both rows is fantastic. Some of our drivers took issue with the Accord's driver's seat, however. Some thought it could use more padding for better comfort on long drives, and a few of our taller editors thought it could use more legroom.

The Accord's interior features a simple center stack with big no-nonsense buttons and knobs, and the climate control system is more than adequate to heat and cool the car. Ample insulation does a good job of keeping unwanted noise out of the cabin, and you'll rarely hear the engine except when pushed hard. For car seats, LATCH anchors are near the rear seat surface, located under clearly marked flaps. The rear bench is wide and spacious enough to accommodate multiple seats.

How's the Accord's tech?

In-cabin tech: 9/10

How’s the tech? Our test car had the available 12.3-inch touchscreen, which looks sharp and includes wireless Apple CarPlay and Android Auto smartphone integration. Honda also offers Google voice assistant and services integration, but only on the top Touring trim. That feels like unnecessary gatekeeping since it's a helpful tech feature that could really improve the ownership experience for people who buy less expensive Accords.

How's the storage & cargo space?

Storage & cargo: 9.5/10

With 16.7 cubic feet of trunk space, there's an abundance of room for your things. Even long items like a golf bag will fit without any fuss. The generously sized center console swallows smaller items and personal effects, and multiple cupholders are spacious enough to handle large water bottles securely.

Is the Accord a good value?

Value: 6.7/10

As a value proposition, the Accord is a tale of two competing truths. On one hand, the overall build quality matches the best of its rivals. We found no squeaks, rattles, panel gaps or cheap materials to complain about. This car feels like it will stand the test of time and endure the daily rigors of family life without issue. On the other hand, the Accord's less expensive trim levels are light on features given the price. A comparable Hyundai Sonata, for example, comes with more features for less money.

Honda's warranty is pretty typical with three-year/36,000-mile basic and five-year/60,000-mile powertrain coverage. Roadside assistance is standard for the life of the basic warranty.

How's the fuel economy?

MPG: 9/10

The Accord lineup ranges from an EPA-estimated 32 mpg combined for the base model to 48 mpg combined for the hybrid with the smaller 17-inch wheels. We tested the Accord Sport-L, which has larger 19-inch wheels and gets an EPA-estimated 44 mpg combined. We recorded 41.5 mpg on our real-world evaluation route. That's short of its EPA figure and also shy of other midsize hybrids we've tested on the same route, but overall this is still a pretty efficient sedan.

Is the Honda Accord special?

X factor: 9/10

The Accord remains Honda's flagship sedan, but it no longer feels like a focus of innovation. Its wow factor seems limited to its solid build quality and efficient powertrain, though we wouldn't call either particularly exciting. A stronger dose of personality and more stand-alone options would go a long way toward making the Accord a standout favorite in the segment. Still, the Accord feels like it will make an excellent companion vehicle and never leave you feeling like you should have spent more for a luxury brand or bought an SUV.

On today’s episode, host Kate Lindsay is joined by Slate senior writer Scaachi Koul to discuss the downfall of Katy Perry. Back in 2025, Scaachi wrote a feature about the singer’s descent from beloved pop star to internet meme, but a recent allegation of sexual assault from actress Ruby Rose has cast her legacy in a whole new light. But in revisiting Katy Perry’s past fifteen years, it turns out the real question is: Did Katy Perry change, or did we?

This podcast is produced by Vic Whitley-Berry, Daisy Rosario, and Kate Lindsay.

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