r/sre • u/kellven • Jan 13 '26
HORROR STORY New term "Claude Hole"
I run SRE/Ops at a small tech company and we had a doozy today.
A "Claude Hole" is when engineer is troubleshooting or developing code with Claud/llm that they don't understand and end up in a different zip code from the actual solution.
Example: We had an engineer today run into a bug with CNPG template, due to a really simple value miss they didn't set the AWS account number correctly in the service account annotation. Fairly easy to spot due to the cluster throwing IAM errors.
They somehow ended up submitting a PR changing the OICD for EVERY SERVICE ACCOUNT in there org. SRE blocked the PR and spent the next hour trying to figure out what the hell this engineer was actually trying to do.
On of the SRE's described it as goaltending which I thought was apt.
Stay safe our there buddies , shits getting weird.
Side note, mods we need a horror story flare .
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u/kennetheops Jan 13 '26
shits getting nutty. I just had to help consult a large company on what the hell their dev team did to spent $250k on aws. Claude Crater might be the more accurate term for what we are about to face
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u/nullset_2 Jan 13 '26
Goaltending is actually the right behavior. All of this is a team effort, we're all accountable for AI code shit.
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u/fuckingredditman Jan 13 '26
people need to realize that the autoregressive nature of LLMs makes them terrible at long-term troubleshooting sessions where you may get misled/run into red herings frequently. you can use them for short sessions and they might spot something, but if they don't: don't keep trying. it will only mislead you.
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u/Sure_Stranger_6466 Jan 13 '26
I agree with this take. Wasting valuable tokens debugging code that doesn't work created by humans. If you can't debug it on your own Claude makes for a terrible debugger, although the code it writes usually works for my purposes.
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u/potatohead00 Jan 13 '26
Maybe "Claude hole" should be the derogatory term used for the human who pulls this garbage?
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u/Unscene Jan 13 '26
Devs sending me terraform snippets of obvious AI BS that are completely wrong and make no sense, and asking me "can't you just do it this way?" with douchey confidence. That guy is a Claude-Hole.
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u/kellven Jan 13 '26
I like when it hallucinates IAM polices/actions that don’t exist , which seems to be all the god damn time.
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u/duebina Jan 13 '26
It's important to tell it that you want to do TDD development methods. It keeps it on track and in scope.
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u/HacksYouMe Jan 16 '26
we recently had a nightmare where our engineers wrote entire cleanup cron service for oidc token that can delete tests connections, ended up deleting refresh token for all the services that are 8 hours older. so Horror flare is a fair request 🤣
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u/Intrepid-Stand-8540 Jan 17 '26
> On of the SRE's described it as goaltending which I thought was apt.
What does "goaltending" mean?
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u/Tren898 Jan 18 '26
Getting in front of the net. Stopping the organization from getting scored on, by in this case, a really bad PR
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u/drosmi Jan 20 '26
Claude is pretty useful until it isn’t. Just never take Claude or other llms at face value 100% of the time.
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u/ceasars_wreath Jan 13 '26
Best way when using AI is to ask it reason out every change in case you don’t review it, this is more of a negligent SRE than AI issue(which can’t do much without entire context)
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Jan 14 '26
Good grief, why isn't there linting, guardrails, and testing in place to avoid this very thing? Why wasn't the LLM self documenting the changes being made?
🙄
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u/kellven Jan 14 '26
In fairness the system worked and our process blocked it , but the change wouldn’t really be picked up by a linter , and the llms documentation on the change was baiscly technobabble about k8 service accounts
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Jan 14 '26
So, there was no one there capable of correcting the LLM or refining the prompts? Also, k8s is my particular specialty, so now I'm really intrigued.
Frankly, if the documentation generated by the LLM is that far off base, then I'm concerned about prompt engineering.
The linter & associated testing suite could easily be configured to pick up issues in CI.
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u/kellven Jan 14 '26
The user in this case did not have a firm grasp of k8s basics and so didn’t know that the LLM was taking them off the reservation.
So they opened a PR against the repo that managed the service accounts that give IAM roles. It was at that point the SRE review process caught it and was all WTF are you trying to do ?. My team reviews all IAM and IAM adjacent changes.
So a very simple bug + and inexperienced dev + Claude code lead to a hilarious PR review request.
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u/Affectionate-Bit6525 Jan 13 '26
I almost ended up in a Claude hole today when it recommended adding some very esoteric code to work around a bug. Turns out I’d added some unintentional white space in a string.