The Root Cause of Never Learning

In this episode of Root Cause we sit down with Adrian Hornsby — former AWS Principal Engineer, founder of Resilium Labs, and author of Why We Still Suck at Resilience — to get to the root cause of what's quietly breaking inside engineering organizations as AI absorbs more of the thinking. We dig into the gap between how we imagine our systems work and how they actually work, why that gap is where all the real learning lives, and what happens to a team when the thinking itself gets delegated to something that sounds confident but doesn't know which walls are load-bearing. 00:00 Pre-show Banter and the Dog01:08 Introduction of the Episode and the Guest05:00 What's Wrong with the Name of the Show07:35 The Importance of Learning from Successes09:53 Defining Work as Imagined and Work as Done13:43 Leading vs Being Hands-On28:49 Learning From the Gap30:39 Chaos Engineering31:31 Load Testing32:50 Game Days34:00 ORRs - Operational Readiness reviews34:41 Learning From the Incident36:25 How AI has Affected the Gap41:57 Navigating the Complexity of AI Delegation43:45 Skill Atrophy and the New Generation of Engineers47:12 Building Tools That Keep You Smart52:18 We Need a Crisis to Slow Down58:30 Building Intuition in AI-Driven Systems01:03:17 The Human Touch in Technology01:07:32 Facing Fears and Embracing Change01:16:28 Question for the Next Guest and ClosingAdrian has generously decided to run a discount with the promocode “rootcausebynune” - for the first 30 copies you can buy his book for as low as 14.99 - that’s over 70% discount over the suggested price!https://leanpub.com/whywestillsuckatresilience/c/rootcausebynune Find Adrian at:Resilium Labs: resiliumlabs.comLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/adhorn/ Substack: https://newsletter.resiliumlabs.com/Find me (Nune) at:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nisabek/ Substack: https://www.thoughtfultechnologist.com/