The 5 Levels of Self-Driving Production — Eric Schwartz, Traversal

This talk contributes to the field of LLM observability and incident management by introducing the concept of 'self-driving production' and its five levels of autonomy. It argues that the proliferation of AI-written code exacerbates debugging challenges, rendering traditional observability insufficient for multi-hop root cause analysis. The talk proposes a causal approach to RCA, leveraging production world models and causal search, and presents case studies demonstrating its application in alert intelligence and incident resolution at enterprise scale. It also provides five critical questions for evaluating AI SRE tools.