Anthropic's on-call engineer opens Claude before the dashboard, and is still hiring humans

Separate triage from ownership and the two halves of Palcuie's account stop fighting each other. Going to the model before the dashboards ^[4] is a claim about the first minutes of a page: what changed, and where to look next. Recruiting staff-level engineers across three countries ^[7] is a claim about who owns the fix and the follow-up. He does not say the first is eating the second, and he is blunt that it would be hypocritical to pretend otherwise ^[5].

The hiring line is worth more than any benchmark number because it costs money. Anthropic is the most favourable test case anyone could construct for automated incident response: unlimited tokens and researchers a desk away, with the on-call engineer himself involved in training the models ^[8]. Palcuie sets that up deliberately before answering no ^[5]. A demo runs on a curated dataset ^[11]. A headcount plan runs on a forecast someone has to fund, and by his own account the team is barely a year old and still growing ^[6][7].

His objection to the benchmark industry is the part worth taking away. What gets scored is whether a model can solve a problem that has already been packaged into a clean prompt, and he says that is not what a 3 a.m. page looks like ^[12]. The packaging is the work. Deciding that the latency graph and the deploy log and a customer complaint are the same event is the expensive judgement, and a scoring harness that hands the model a tidy problem statement has already done it for free.

Meanwhile the supply side keeps growing. Palcuie counts at least ten companies pitching some version of AI SRE ^[9], with two more surfacing while he wrote the slides ^[10], which puts him at twelve or more before he had delivered the talk ^[19]. He angel invests and says the pitches make him more skeptical rather than less ^[16], while also saying he wants those companies to keep practising ^[15]. That is a coherent position, and it is the one being asked about at dinner parties by engineers whose VPs have told them to do something with AI ^[17].

Two things the material does not settle. The transcript we have breaks off just as he turns to the useful ways Claude helps him on call, so the specific tasks he trusts it with are not in evidence here ^[18]. And his no carries an asterisk about timelines: he says he would not be surprised if this becomes possible later ^[14]. The load is not theoretical either. He says Claude goes down more often than anyone would like, and he was pulled into an incident while at the conference ^[13].