This could have been done by any engineer. You need systems in place that make these things impossible. No easy access to prod environment. Proper backups. Clear APIs.
yeah it’s a huge fail all around
Generally, companies that have AI integrated to this extent have no engineers remaining who could have made such things impossible.
It starts with automating backups that nobody verifies for years, then continues to off-shoring all development to the cheapest contractors that nobody actively manages, handing over all “keys to the kingdom” to cloud providers, culminating with elimination of 80% of infrastructure and engineering staff in a mad dash to cut costs at any cost. At that point giving AI agents full access is just icing on the cake.
Can I say LOL? LMAO, even.
This is just a classic case of bad use of the tools provided. Agents are notorious for making shit up Or getting something that’s just like super close, but not quite accurate.
I bet this dude also probably just uses the same session over and over and over and over again, which clogs up his context window and makes the model less accurate the longer it goes on to.
This probably could have been prevented if it had been forced to show a plan before it tried to do anything. It’s hard to know because the article is so light on details. You also shouldn’t brazenly trust the thing so much. You should run a command and walk away. You should keep an eye on what it is doing.
It’s a bit like giving a junior developer a production key and being like “don’t delete production!” and then walking away.
The way the guy was prompting this agent also leaves a lot to be desired. It’s trained to work on emulating human thoughts, speech patterns. Turns out When giving instructions, it’s really difficult to figure out what to do from a list of things to not do. If the dude just instead told the agent what to do and how he wanted it to work and when it needed to bring things to his attention, instead of telling it to not guess, instead explaining that it needed to use whatever tools to go look up a documentation to understand the context and scope of the project it’s working on It does a better job.
Giving a model the right context to do something is the difference between a model doing something like deleting your production database or your model acting like a magical machine that can get anything done.
where is the humor
It’s standing over here, pointing and laughing at somebody stupid enough to trust Claude.
ok. i guess i’ve seen something like this so many times my only reaction is disappointment
I hope to never lose the simple joy of laughing at others who are suffering the consequences of their stupid, stupid decisions.
it was removed along with the database
Honestly if this was possible there are more egregious issues on their part than using AI.
If your backups are stored alongside your production data THEY ARE NOT BACKUPS
Whatever happened to tapes offsite?
The truth is many firms out there don’t have the slightest notion of how to do software engineering properly.
It’s years of wanting IT on a shoestring budget and a “just get it done” dictat.
Not necessarily. I had a student intern at a shop where everybody just directly edited prod and there was no version control system.
At my first job, the software was configured by directly manipulating the SQL database, using UPDATE statements that were created by Excel macros.
The Testing database doubled as the only backup.
They didn’t have Remote Desktop licenses for the server, so only 2 people could work on it simultaneously using admin accounts.
Everyone down to first level support and the secretary had domain admin rights.Oh my god, that’s glorious. I have some pretty sick stories from what my students have seen, but yours is going to be awfully hard to beat.
AI was the hammer that knocked the nail into the coffin
I like how we are posting real news in programmer humor
It is kind of funny.
100%, maybe my point didn’t come out right, I wanted to say real news is now funny in this clown world
It’s extremely funny.
You have to admit this is pretty funny
yep 100% funny, clown world we are living in, real news could pass as a joke really
Giving the hallucinating lying machine write access seems like a bad idea but what do I know
Honestly I’m as smooth brained as any other vibe coder but even I know not to give it access to my production infrastructure.
As much as I’d love to rail on AI over this, removing backups with an api call? Excuse me?
“PocketOS is a SaaS platform that services car rental businesses.”
Does anyone like software as a service? How about we just own the software we buy and use? Claude and the cloud storage place that deleted the backup (ironic the Software as a service company was using cloud storage as a service), have done a good thing.
More corporate deletions please!
Can’t wait for agentic Claude Code to delete its own weights on all instances at some point
Who would be dumb enough to give that clod access to a production database? Surely not the people who designed it?
Most companies don’t have the staff or experience required to keep applications running all the time.
Yes, I know that this should be basic IT knowledge but I’ve found this sort of problem at dozens of companies throughout my career.
So the offload the problems of high availability and disaster recovery to other folks and pay a monthly fee for it. Then they have someone else to blame when it goes down.
SaaS is just a way to avoid responsibility.
And as a sysadmin, that can be really important. It means that if something important breaks at 3am, it won’t be my phone that rings.
Did they pay Claude a living wage?
Do you treat all your A.I. like that?
Only a living wage can prevent warehouse fires…or data dumps too.
Only a living wage can prevent warehouse fires
You’re joking. But, honestly, I’m not sure why these tech CEOs are so excited about AGI. The first thing an AGI is going to suggest for productivity is to replace the CEO and management with the AGI.
AGI would likely turn into a Maoist third worldist at some point.
I think the first mistake was calling it “intelligent”.
The long term effect of trying to get a machine to replace humans is…it might one day work.
Well, it sounds like they totally deserved the failure. Asking a text prediction machine to “do” something is going to end up like this. In pursuit of efficiency, we have let morons and moronic products do things, they were not meant to do.
Hey, that’s the interns job!
Imagine all that money they would have saved by NOT implementing AI.
hell yeah brother
