tl;dr: Drawing on Lisanne Bainbridge's 1983 "Ironies of Automation," the author argues that as AI handles routine incident response, SREs lose the hands-on practice needed to build intuition for the rare, novel outages that still require human expertise — a problem compounded by "never-skilling" among juniors who never develop those skills in the first place. Proposed mitigations include deliberately reserving incidents for human practice and designing AI as a collaborator rather than a supervisor-approved autopilot. The piece is also a soft pitch for SigNoz's observability-native AI approach.