Claude Code for the Outer Loop: An AI SRE Playbook to Reduce On-Call Toil

It is 2:13am. PagerDuty fires for checkout-service, p95 past threshold for four minutes. You open Datadog, find the wrong dashboard, then the right one, then the CI tool for recent deploys, then Jira for open incidents, then #incidents in Slack to check whether a co-worker is already in the war room. Eight minutes in, you have a working hypothesis. That is not incident response. That is a context-loading tax the on-call pays before the work begins. Coding agents, such as Claude Code, are eating