AI didn't delete your database, you did

I was just talking to my girlfriend saying I've realised that I've not written a single line of code, nor have I debugged myself for at least the past 3 months.

Having said that, given what I've seen Claude do, I find it hard to believe that Claude would go from credential mismatch to delete the volume. I understand LLMs are probabilistic, but going from "credentials wrong" to "delete volume" is highly unlikely.

> Supabase

I don't know enough about the Railway/Vercel/Replit, but I can tell you Supabase adds a huge amount of value. The fact that I don't have to code half of things that I otherwise would is great to start something. If it's too expensive, I can implement things later once there is revenue to cover devs or time.

Now: the CEO gets paid the big bucks and has the least direct accountability, very much because it's their job to take responsibility for people more powerful than them, and likewise the CTO with major commercial software contracts like a Claude subscription. That's why this guy was so hard to take seriously: okay fine, you got burned by Anthropic, stop being a baby about it. Take responsibility for not listening to the critics.

But - to be a little more neutral about my personal distaste - I do think vibe coders are making a very similar mistake to C developers throughout the 90s, where problems with the tooling were not merely dismissed, but actively valorized.

Real Devs use buffers freely and don't make overflow errors.

Real Devs use hands-free agentic development and don't delete production databases.

The article proposes automation as the solution for such mistakes. But infrastructure automation tools like Terraform rely on the exact API that resulted in the database getting deleted.

IMO the biggest mistakes were:

1. Having an unrestricted API token accessible by AI. Apparently they were not aware that the token had that many permissions.

2. No deletion protection on the production database volume.

3. Deleting a volume immediately deletes all associated snapshots. Snapshot deletion should be delayed by default. I think AWS has the same unsafe default, but at least their support can restore the volume. https://alexeyondata.substack.com/p/how-i-dropped-our-produc...

AI wasn't the main issue (though it grabbing tokens from random locations is rather scary). But automation isn't the answer either, a Terraform misconfiguration could have just as easily deleted the database.

Their cloud provider needs to work on safe defaults (limited privileges and delayed snapshot deletion), and communicating more clearly (the user should notice they're creating an unrestricted token).

To summarise them:

1. Do not anthropomorphise AI systems.

2. Do not blindly trust the output of AI systems.

3. Retain full human responsibility and accountability for any consequences arising from the use of AI systems.

I would like to see the language around AI become less anthropomorphic and more technical. I believe that precise language encourages clear thinking and good judgement. If we treat AI like another tool and use language that reflects that, it will become abundantly obvious that in many cases, the responsibility of any 'mistake' made by the tool falls on the user of the tool.

But alas, ideas like this do not travel very far when I express them on my small website. It would help if more prominent personalities articulated these principles, so they become more widely adopted.