I think the credit belongs to Sascha still. Look at this:
> The agent surfaced a suspicious issue: the anetd pods in our Google Kubernetes Engine cluster were restarting constantly, around 120 restarts per pod over six days, which is almost one crash per hour. Surely, this couldn't be right!
> Sascha dug into the crash dumps. The stack trace pointed to a concurrent map-access panic, multiple goroutines trying to read and write to the same data structure at the same time without proper locking. But the key detail was where the panic happened: inside the Wireguard module of anetd.
AI: Your anted pod is crashing.
Engineer: Looks in the logs and finds a stack trace.
Your agent didn't find the bug. It's really that simple.
A new bug appears, it’s in an encryption layer. You solve this by deciding to disable the encryption layer because user experience is better without the errors. You write it up as a recruitment piece for your engineering team.
There may be some good answers and lessons, but they didn’t make it into the article. Saying it’s on a cloud provider’s private network so encryption between your nodes isn’t necessary is a bold choice. Also, what happened to the root cause? Why did it start failing a week ago? Was a downgrade of the offending code not possible?
Not all bug investigations are worth really digging into. Sometimes the right call is to find any fix and move on. But all the nuance, judgement, implications, and lessons learned failed to make it into this post. And they are what make reading incident reports interesting for most engineers.
Isn't this like the #1 problem people have with wireguard? I've had clients with the MTU issue every time I've set it up for more than a few clients. Also how on earth is "connection reset by peer" dreaded?
came to say this. it's the AI writing cadence, I can smell it from 1000ft:
- Lots of "The" headings
- Always "why it matters"
- Machine gun style cadence of short sentences
I hate that AI has stolen my emdashes and I can't use them without looking like slop. But I will die defending markdown as my preferred note taking format. They're not taking that away from me.
I felt like this with the word delve. Seemed like nobody had ever heard the word before, and that the only possible way it’d be written was if an llm did it - but it’s just a nice word.
Delve was used a lot in corporate writing. A lot of the so-called "whitepapers" that businesses like to publish to show how smart they are were ingested in training models.
Just on HN alone I think I've seen roughly 3948538902748750897520938 mentions of emdashes when others were complaining about slop in the past 2 months. It might as well be the unofficial slop logo. Folks are treating it like a dead giveaway.
I feel like a school friend of mine has been taken from me.
Oh my, a bug in Wireguard? What did Google change, since it affects only them? Any lessons learned about modifying cryptographic software?
...
Skipping past the investigation bit (minimising my daily slop intake), it's a wrong MTU value causing failing connections when Wireguard is disabled:
> When we disabled WireGuard, we expected the configuration to change to use the full 1500 bytes. However, some nodes in the cluster hadn't been restarted [and were] using the old 1420-byte MTU.
> [paraphrased] This particularly affected Valkey connections because they were distributed across nodes with mismatched MTU settings. So your API pod might not connect. The fix was rerolling all the nodes to get a consistent MTU configuration
Great idea, rebuild a whole fleet of VMs instead of adding the MTU configuration to your wg-down script
This piece might be a record for how quick it took me to smell the AI-tone and close the tab.. one paragraph! I'm sure it's an interesting bug but I can't stomach reading any more slop.
I think "AI-tone" is a much better way to characterize this stuff than accusing people of using AI. The problem has always been the same. Putting out slop feels disrespectful to the people you want to read/watch your stuff.
Makes me think of how pre-chatGPT I still could barely handle most recipe blogs because of their well known attempts at "filling space". And yea the problem is significantly magnified now everywhere else.
Anyway, my point is, whether or not someone uses AI is almost secondary in a way (even though it can seem pretty obvious to most of us when it's being used). All that matters is if the writing seems like it cares more about throwing words at people instead of actually conveying its points in a way to elicit understanding.
> The agent surfaced a suspicious issue: the anetd pods in our Google Kubernetes Engine cluster were restarting constantly, around 120 restarts per pod over six days, which is almost one crash per hour. Surely, this couldn't be right!
> Sascha dug into the crash dumps. The stack trace pointed to a concurrent map-access panic, multiple goroutines trying to read and write to the same data structure at the same time without proper locking. But the key detail was where the panic happened: inside the Wireguard module of anetd.
AI: Your anted pod is crashing.
Engineer: Looks in the logs and finds a stack trace.
Your agent didn't find the bug. It's really that simple.
There may be some good answers and lessons, but they didn’t make it into the article. Saying it’s on a cloud provider’s private network so encryption between your nodes isn’t necessary is a bold choice. Also, what happened to the root cause? Why did it start failing a week ago? Was a downgrade of the offending code not possible?
Not all bug investigations are worth really digging into. Sometimes the right call is to find any fix and move on. But all the nuance, judgement, implications, and lessons learned failed to make it into this post. And they are what make reading incident reports interesting for most engineers.
AI writing takes these to an extreme but we have see the same happening everywhere even before AI
They are a false positive signal for identifying AI texts anyway.
At least, in reasonably long sections of text. I find it can be hard to tell one way or the other in shorter texts (like comments)
I feel like a school friend of mine has been taken from me.
and the comments above it
...
Skipping past the investigation bit (minimising my daily slop intake), it's a wrong MTU value causing failing connections when Wireguard is disabled:
> When we disabled WireGuard, we expected the configuration to change to use the full 1500 bytes. However, some nodes in the cluster hadn't been restarted [and were] using the old 1420-byte MTU.
> [paraphrased] This particularly affected Valkey connections because they were distributed across nodes with mismatched MTU settings. So your API pod might not connect. The fix was rerolling all the nodes to get a consistent MTU configuration
Great idea, rebuild a whole fleet of VMs instead of adding the MTU configuration to your wg-down script
Makes me think of how pre-chatGPT I still could barely handle most recipe blogs because of their well known attempts at "filling space". And yea the problem is significantly magnified now everywhere else.
Anyway, my point is, whether or not someone uses AI is almost secondary in a way (even though it can seem pretty obvious to most of us when it's being used). All that matters is if the writing seems like it cares more about throwing words at people instead of actually conveying its points in a way to elicit understanding.