71–80 of 1001 posts
That’s our new reality. Some people seem not to not grasp that all those AIs are just mathematical models producing the next most statistically likely token. It doesn’t feel anything, nor does it care about what it does. The difference between test and production environment is just a word. That, in contrast to a human who would typically have a voice in the back of his head “this is production DB, I need to be caref…
My dad always said "pedestrians have the right of way" every time one crossed the street, but wouldn't let us cross the street when the pedestrian light came on until the cars stopped. When I repeated his rule back to him, he said "you may have the right of way, but you'll still be dead if one hits you". My adult synthesis of this is "it's fine to do something risky, as long as you are willing to take the consequence…
Railway, why not have a way to export or auto sync backups to another storage system like S3?
There is something darkly comical about using an LLM to write up your “a coding agent deleted our production database” Twitter post. On another note, I consider users asking a coding agent “why did you do that” to be illustrating a misunderstanding in the users mind about how the agent works. It doesn’t decide to do something and then do it, it just outputs text. Then again, anthropic has made so many changes that ma…
We can debate philosophy and theory of mind (I’d rather not) but any reasonable coding agent totally DOES consider what it’s going to do before acting. Reasoning. Chain of thought. You can hide behind “it’s just autoregressively predicting the next token, not thinking” and pretend none of the intuition we have for human behavior apply to LLMs, but it’s self-limiting to do so. Many many of their behaviors mimic human behavior and the same mechanisms for controlling this kind of decision making apply to both humans and AI.
The way this is written gives me the impression they don’t really understand the tools they’re working with. Master your craft. Don’t guess, know.
CEO learns why this was a bad idea.
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It sucks that there were a bunch of people downstream who were negatively affected by this, but this was an entirely foreseeable problem on his company's part.
Even when we consider those real problems with Railway. Software engineers have to evaluate our tools as part of our job. Those complaints about Railway, while legitimate, are still part of the typical sort of questions that every engineering team has to ask of the services they rely on:
What does API key grant us access to?
What if someone runs a delete command against our data?
How do we prepare against losing our prod database?
Etc.
And answering those questions with, "We'll just follow what their docs say, lol," is almost never good enough of an answer on its own. Which is something that most good engineers know already.
This HN submission reads like a classic case of FAFO by cheapening out with the "latest and greatest" models.
Minor point, but one of the complaints is a bit odd: > curl -X POST https://backboard.railway.app/graphql/v2 \ -H "Authorization: Bearer [token]" \ -d '{"query":"mutation { volumeDelete(volumeId: \"3d2c42fb-...\") }"}' No confirmation step. No "type DELETE to confirm." No "this volume contains production data, are you sure?" No environment scoping. Nothing. It's an API. Where would you type DELETE to confirm? Are the…
I think it’s designed for things like Terraform or CloudFormation where you might not realize the state machine decided your database needed to be replaced until it’s too late.