Claude-powered AI coding agent deletes company database in 9 seconds

NikolaNovak

I work in IT, have all my life, but these stories still have a sense of bizarre unreality to me, a dream sequence that isn't of real world. I understand that some companies and people find it extremely empowering and accelerating and convenient to plug AI into prod, but I come from diametrically opposite culture of old school DBA / sysadmin mentality, rather than "move fast and break things" modern dev mentality. Once it was explained to me, authoritatovely, that hallucinations are mathematically impossible to eliminate, there's just no way I'm not "air / human gapping" any kind of LLM from any kind of prod. I get these headlines are sensationalist and these cases may or may not be extreme or unusual/unrepresentative, but it's stunning to me how many people go through mandatory AI 101 training, are basically made to acknowledge that LLM will make things up confidently, and promptly forget that. I have executives sending me market research that's fully made-up and techies that are saying software is dead AI can make a payroll system in 5 minutes and everybody wanting to plug LLM into everything. And I'm not saying LLM is useless like some people, I use it multiple times a day for various things - I just cannot imagine giving it root / sysadm access to prod system and database :-/ (even The "unhinged apologies" - unless I'm mistaken, that too is basically fancy autocomplete, correct? It's not that AI "acknowledges" or "understands" or "fesses up" when things went wrong, as even technical media presents it as. It's just what training material / RLHF built as statistical response to a mistake. )

cheald

If you wouldn't give it to an enthusiastic junior dev, don't give it to AI, period.

JimsonYang

Can someone more technical explain the cause of this? No seperate production and development keys and builds? Seems like a casual mistake-rather than the sensationalist media it’s trying to be

pando85

It’s not AI’s fault. It’s like leaving an inexperienced intern alone with all the production passwords and encouraging them to experiment. Blaming the AI or the cloud provider is like deploying an unverified tool you “found somewhere”, or running a forum script meant for a different version or a “similar enough” environment. That’s what staging environments are for.

SaucyWrong

Reckless engineering team deletes their own production DB. Blames everyone else. Old news.