And a sleep-deprived senior? Even then. They shouldn't have access to destructive effects on prod.
Maybe the senior can get broader access in a time-limited scope if senior management temporarily escalates the developers access to address a pressing production issue, but at that point the person addressing the issue shouldn't be fighting to stay awake nor lulled into a false sense of security as during day to day operations.
Otherwise it's only the release pipeline that should have permissions to take destructive actions on production and those actions should be released as part of a peer reviewed set of changes through the pipeline.
Clause, maybe, is a junior DEV.
Not a release engineer.
You don't work in anything considered Safety Critical, do you?
> will not be a viable position to hold long term
Why not? We've literally done it without robots, smart or dumb, for years.
And we've written extremely buggy and insecure C code for decades too. That doesn't mean that we should keep doing that. AI can much faster troubleshoot and resolve production issues than humans. Putting humans in the loop will cause for longer downtime and more revenue loss.
Can, yes, with proper guardrails. The problem is that it seems like every team is learning this the hard way. It'd be great to have a magical robot that could magically solve all our problems without the risk of it wrecking everything. But most teams aren't there yet and to suggest that it's THE way to go without the nuances of "btw it could delete your prod db" is irresponsible at best.
Read-write production access without even the equivalent of "sudo" is just insane and asking for trouble.
It usually takes about 10 months for folks to have a moment of clarity. Or for the true believer they often double down on the obvious mistakes. =3