Reel · Career & Build · Nov 1, 2026
Lose Your Prod: an SRE rap about AI and on-call
In short
An SRE rap with one message: lose your prod in staging, on purpose, so it doesn't happen for real. AI can ship the code, but at 3 AM, when the region goes dark and the DNS lies, someone with runbook eyes still gets the call. The music is an original AI-generated track made on a paid plan, the lyrics are mine, and the visuals were coded in Remotion.
Checklist: what to do about it
- Pick one dependency and break it in staging this month, on purpose.
- Write down what you expect to happen before you break it.
- Have a runbook for that failure, and check it actually works.
- Own the outcome, not the typing: the rollback, the postmortem and the fix.
- Go deeper where AI makes the work harder: reliability, security, platform and data.
The SAFE cheat sheet: 5 tech roles AI makes more valuable
This is what the reel's SAFE keyword sends. Rule: the job that survives is the one that owns the outcome, not the typing.
- SRE / on-call engineer. When the region goes dark, someone owns the runbook, the rollback and the postmortem. Accountability doesn't automate.
- Security engineer. The US BLS projects information-security analyst jobs to grow 21% (2025–35), "much faster than average". AI widens the attack surface.
- Platform / infra engineer. Someone has to run the GPUs, the pipelines and the failover every AI feature quietly depends on.
- AI / ML engineer. The WEF lists AI and ML specialists among the fastest-growing roles to 2030.
- Data engineer. Big data specialists top the WEF's fastest-growing list. Models are only as good as the data plumbing behind them.
Sources named on the cheat sheet: WEF Future of Jobs Report 2025; BLS Occupational Outlook Handbook.