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Understanding how automation changes work — task by task, with the evidence shown and the uncertainty admitted.

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On this pageWhich technologiesHow it got hereMethod and sources
Occupations›DevOps / platform / SRE engineer›How we know

DevOps / platform / SRE engineer — how we know

The page itself gives the judgements. This one gives what they rest on: which technologies bear on the work, how the estimate moved since language models reached the public, and the method behind both.

Assessed
2026-09-14
With evidence
2/4
Verified events
4

Which technologies matter here#

Four separate signals. They are deliberately not added together — a job exposed to two technologies is not twice as exposed.

Cognitive automation
Writing the configurationBeing woken upWhat it costs and whyDeciding how it should be built

How it got here#

The index is not a static number. This is where it would have sat at each capability checkpoint since ChatGPT — reconstructed, and labelled as such.

Reconstructed · platform inferenceEstimated today for each past checkpoint — not measured at the time. 30 → 46.
1007550250
Two Google engineers described the agents their own SRE organisation runs in incident response: alert grouping, handoff documents, postmortem drafts, and in some cases autonomous mitigationCloudflare's policy automation platform generated a routing policy that leaked BGP prefixes for 25 minutes; the stated fix adds automated policy checks to CI/CD, not human reviewDORA's 2025 survey reports 90% of respondents using AI at work, and finds AI adoption still has a negative relationship with software delivery stability123456789not assessed
2022 H22024 H2Now

—— this stretch contains a verified event- - - no event in this stretch — reconstruction only0 = no task exposed, 100 = every task exposed

● 3 verified events for this occupation, plotted at the date it happened — the parts of the line near a marker are anchored to something checkable.

The climb is configuration: infrastructure code either applies cleanly or errors, and a machine-checkable outcome is what lets a model try, fail and retry unattended. It is also verbose and repetitive, so the volume drafted is large and the review is quick. The curve flattens at the on-call, which has no mechanism to move — an incident is by definition the failure nobody anticipated, and the call is about acceptable damage rather than a correct answer. Two things the height hides: faster configuration produces more configuration, so hours move from writing to untangling, which is invisible on a roadmap; and the change that reaches people here is services-per-engineer, which thins the rota without removing a single task.

12022 H230General-purpose text generation reaches the public. Before this point, exposure came from automation that was already deployed — OCR, RPA, machine vision, self-checkout, dispatch algorithms. ChatGPT research preview (2022-11-30) ↗
22023 H133A general model that passes professional exams. First-draft quality crosses the threshold where professional work starts using it. GPT-4 (2023-03-14) ↗
32023 H237Vision input, long context and tool calling. Models can be pointed at documents and connected to systems, which is what moves process work rather than writing work. GPT-4 Turbo:128k 上下文、视觉、工具调用(DevDay) (2023-11-06) ↗
42024 H141The same capability gets much cheaper and faster. Nothing new becomes possible; a lot becomes affordable at volume, which is when deployment decisions change.
52024 H244Reasoning models that work through multi-step problems, and the first models that operate a computer by looking at the screen. The second one is what reaches software-operating jobs. OpenAI o1(推理);同期 Claude 的 computer use 进入公测 (2024-09-12) ↗
62025 H145Agents begin operating real software end to end rather than producing text for a person to paste. This is also when the first public reversals appear — organisations that automated and partly undid it. Claude 3.7 Sonnet 与 Claude Code:混合推理 + 命令行编码代理 (2025-02-24) ↗
72025 H246Long context and tool use become the default rather than a feature. Capability gains continue; the visible constraint shifts from what models can do to liability, procurement and cost. GPT-5(2025-08-07);Claude Opus 4.5(2025-11-24) (2025-08-07) ↗
82026 H146Long-horizon agents land inside specific industry workflows. Adoption becomes sector-specific rather than general. GPT-5.5:「专为实际工作打造」 (2026-04-23) ↗
9Now46The current assessment — this point is the impact index published on the occupation's page, so the curve is anchored to a number the site already stands behind. Worth noting for the flat curves: in the same weeks, a research preview of a shared specification for AI agents to operate physical devices was opened to research labs and manufacturers. That is the first capability class pointed at the physical occupations whose lines here barely move. GPT-6 Astra(2026-09-03);Claude Fable 5.1 / Mythos 5.1(2026-09-01);Model Hardware Standard 研究预览(2026-08-27) (2026-09-03) ↗

A flat line is not a forecast of safety. It says which tasks automation has reached so far — the occupations that moved least here are the ones where the constraint is physical or regulatory, and both of those can change.

Method and sources#

Assessment date
2026-09-14
Basis of the task judgements
2 evidence-backed · 2 platform inference · 0 not enough evidence
Verified events
4

How we assess an occupation →

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