Reflection on SREcon 2026

April 6, 2026

SREcon Americas 2026 wrapped up a week (and change) ago Seattle and it was a great program, great content, and fun times to catch up with all sorts of friends I’ve missed.

(I was also graced by a spur-of-the-moment opportunity to speak at the conference!)

Videos will be posted soon, so I’ll save thoughts on specific talks until then, but I noticed a few interesting themes this year:

  • AI, AI, Oh? — AI was the topical belle of the ball and it was hard to find a track, hallway or otherwise, where attendees weren’t discussing the implications of AI for our practices, our community, and the general future of SRE work.

    One thing I repeatedly found heartening was both the intentionality and nuance with which SREcon attendees are treating the subject. There wasn’t the complete “unbridled enthusiasm” AI is often met with; rather, the discussions I heard were much more focused on concrete practices, lively debates of fitness for actual purpose, and an honest look at the various tradeoffs to be considered when using and deploying AI in our systems.

    If I had to guess why this is, I think it’s because SREs are generally in the position of putting out fires in our infrastructure, and there are plenty of stories (and more shared at SREcon every year) of AI agents running around that beloved infrastructure cosplaying as lil’ arsonists.

    Is this to say the SRE community hates AI? Not at all; in fact quite the contrary. But I really appreciated the thoughtful and measured way our community approaches the topic, trying to separate wheat from chaff and marketing from reality just as we’ve done for so many technologies.

  • Oregon Trail SREs are A Thing™ — Folks may be familiar with the concept of the so-called “Oregon Trail Generation” (or, sometimes, Xennials), the cohort of folks born between 1977 and 1983. Demographers have found this generation interesting generally because their coming of age spanned the pre- and post-Internet era, and that has resulted in some interesting and notable (and maybe even useful?) qualities.

    This SREcon, I started to notice folks that, based on our discussions, I would call “Oregon Trail SREs”: they remember Perl scripts and mysql 3.23 and racking and stacking machines in eardrum-destroying data centers. But now, they manage large cloud fleets and work in “hyperscaled” environments.

    I think the most obvious trait I noticed about folks who lived through this shift—and I’m one of them—is the questions they ask. Sometimes, it’s useful to have someone who ran their own BIND or sendmail servers back in the day, because they know when it’s very, very likely to be DNS even when everyone else in the room swears that it isn’t.

  • SREs care about the Junior Engineers — Not so long ago, I was attending a dinner at another conference and was chatting with someone who worked for one of The Big AI Companies™. At one point in conversation after regaling us all with the myriad amazing ways he uses all the AI, he concluded “So yeah... I think us senior engineers are going to be totally fine in this new world”

    “What about the junior engineers?” someone inquired.

    His answer shocked me. “Oh, they’re screwed. But I don’t care about them.”

    I prodded a little more: “At some point, you’re going to probably retire. Don’t you want the people behind you to be able to take care of the critical digital infrastructure (including, I don’t know, the medical device software) we’ll all be relying on then?”

    “Eh. I still don’t care about them. We'll have perfect agents by then.”

    SREcon was an incredibly stark contrast: multiple folks in multiple conversations were genuinely concerned about how to include junior engineers in this shift, what it means for them, and how we get them to distrust DNS in this new AI world as much as we do.

    Because one can’t “get a degree” in SRE, many of us got into this space through the kindness of strangers helping us climb the ladder. It made me feel sincerely proud to be a part of a community that hasn’t forgotten that, and isn’t dragging that ladder up behind them.

  • SRE is now incident management? — A friend and I were reminiscing at the conference last week, and she said “I think DevOps has just morphed into CI/CD and it feels like SRE is just turning into incident management.” There were a fair number of talks (mine included) about incident response, analysis, and general management, and it’s been a palpable theme of recent SREcons, for sure.

    I’m not sure I entirely agree, but I do think it highlights SRE’s focus on the role humans play in any system (AI-infused or not). Incidents continue to provide fertile ground to explore how humans and machines (and machines that are taught to act like humans) work together, which is why I think there is such attention on it. It’s a comfortable, familiar space for our community to explore these topics and I, for one, am here for it... figuratively and literally.

What’s in store for SREs (and AI?!!!) in 2026?

I’m not sure any of us knows entirely, but... I’m looking forward to discussing it with y’all at SREcon in 2027!