Incidents *Will* Happen. Are You (Actually) Prepared?

Joe Mckevitt, CTO of Uptime Labs, argues that incident prevention and incident preparation are not substitutes, and that organizations relying on the heroic engineer who knows the infrastructure at 2am have a habit, not a strategy. The piece pushes for a deliberate playbook (practiced communication, pre-understood failure behavior, repeatable response) over runbooks decaying in Confluence, and notes that AI in the execution path will reshape failure modes rather than reduce the need for human-led preparation.