From interactive notebooks to operational automation

The world of operational automation is at an inflection point. Traditional approaches are brittle and hard to use, while emerging AI capabilities promise flexibility but lack the safety and security guarantees critical processes demand. At SiftD, we're extending interactive notebooks to create something new: operational applications that combine the best of human judgment with the efficiency of agentic AI.

The Modern Operations Challenge

Gone are the days when a "sysadmin" could keep systems running with a handful of scripts and deep knowledge of bare metal servers. Today's DevOps, SRE, and Platform engineers navigate an intricate web of cloud services, monitoring platforms, CI/CD pipelines, and infrastructure-as-code tools. Even routine operations—like investigating an incident or performing a deployment—might require orchestrating actions across a dozen different interfaces.

This complexity has created a fundamental tension in how we approach automation:

Traditional automation scripts are brittle by design. They must explicitly handle every edge case, making complex workflows increasingly difficult for humans to understand and maintain. As underlying systems evolve, these scripts require constant updates just to keep working. It's no wonder so many teams fall back to documentation-style runbooks—they're simply easier to write and change, even if they're more error-prone to execute.

Agentic AI, on the other hand, offers unprecedented power and flexibility. They can work tirelessly scanning your data, adapt to unexpected situations, and handle ambiguity. But this flexibility comes at a cost: unpredictability. In production environments, you can't afford an AI agent that might accidentally drop a database table while trying to fix a simple API timeout. The risk simply isn't worth it for most operational tasks.

The Interactive Notebook Advantage

This is where the concept of interactive notebooks becomes powerful. We've taken this proven paradigm—familiar to data scientists and analysts—and evolved it into something purpose-built for operations. SPIN (SiftD Platform Intelligence Notebooks) turns notebooks into operational applications that provide a structured yet flexible framework for orchestrating complex operations across multiple systems.

These operational applications are living documents that combine:

• Documentation that explains what's happening and why
• Flexible actions that can query logs, update configurations, or trigger deployments
• History that provides important context (what happened last time we ran this?) for analysis and collaboration
• Human checkpoints where operators can verify results and make judgment calls
• Runtime agents that seamingless blend human and AI interaction, for both operator driven and background execution.

Unlike traditional notebooks that focus on data analysis, these applications are purpose-built for operational workflows. They maintain the flexibility operators need—run a cell multiple times if results are unexpected, skip steps when appropriate—while providing deterministic safeguards that prevent unauthorized or dangerous actions.

Human-in-the-Loop by Design

We at SiftD strongly believe that every workflow is a human-in-the-loop workflow. All automation ultimately relies on humans to design, implement, and maintain it. That’s why SPIN is optimized for human control and oversight without creating operational bottlenecks. These notebook-based applications provide an intuitive interface for operators to:

1. Understand the flow at a glance, with clear documentation alongside executable code
2. Control execution with the ability to seamlessly transition back and forth between manual interactions and agentic AI automation.
3. Learn through interaction, making them ideal for onboarding new team members or handling unfamiliar scenarios

This approach transforms operational procedures from black boxes into transparent, manageable processes. The lightweight structure breaks down complex problems into digestible chunks while maintaining the flexibility to handle the unexpected.

Collaboration at the Core

Perhaps most importantly, these operational applications are built for collaboration. Whether working with AI agents or other people, sharing context with minimal friction is critical.

When an incident occurs in the middle of the night, an on-call engineer can:

• Rely on pre-built notebooks that have already run and gathered pre-requisted information, potentially already having triggered remediation processes.
• Manually interact with existing notebook sessions to see what has been done already and understand the problem more deeply
• Have AI agents assist with analyzing execution outputs and suggest next steps.
• Create new notebooks on demand to explore alternative hypotheses or try new solutions.
• Share all of this context with other team members with a single click.
• All artifacts from this process are incorporated into the knowledge base to be leveraged in the future.

This approach breaks down silos between teams. Support engineers can safely investigate customer issues deep on the infrastructure stack. Junior team members can handle complex operations with confidence. Senior engineers can encode their expertise in reusable, evolving applications.

The Path Forward

At SiftD, we're not trying to replace human operators or create fully autonomous systems. We're building tools that amplify human capabilities while maintaining the safety and predictability that production environments demand.

By building on the interactive notebook paradigm, we're creating a new category of operational applications—ones that acknowledge the complexity of modern infrastructure while respecting the value of human oversight. These applications are flexible enough to handle the unexpected, structured enough to ensure safety, and collaborative enough to scale knowledge across teams.

As we continue to develop this platform, we're focused on the real-world challenges that DevOps, SRE, technical support, and platform teams face every day: troubleshooting production issues, performing complex migrations, auditing system configurations, and managing deployments across heterogeneous environments.

The future of operations isn't about choosing between rigid automation and chaotic flexibility. It's about creating operational applications that find the right balance—and we believe building on the interactive notebook concept is the key to achieving it.