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

tomshardware.com

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

#11

Post by _aavaa_ »

rafaelmn wrote: post #8
NikolaNovak wrote: post #3

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. Onc…

> Once it was explained to me, authoritatovely, that hallucinations are mathematically impossible to eliminate That's a weak criteria - hallucinations are mathematically impossible to eliminate in humans.

Humans can be held responsible; what are you gonna do to the AI? Wipe the context?

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

#12

Post by 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.

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

#13

Post by oceansky »

rafaelmn wrote: post #8
NikolaNovak wrote: post #3

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. Onc…

> Once it was explained to me, authoritatovely, that hallucinations are mathematically impossible to eliminate That's a weak criteria - hallucinations are mathematically impossible to eliminate in humans.

I was going to say that at least the human brain is deterministic, but a Google search say this is not a scientific consensus

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

#15

Post by Corrado »

NikolaNovak wrote: post #3

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. Onc…

I think that an eventual consequence of using AI is that more and more of these things will happen. Like you, I'm experienced enough to know that you separate environments completely; nothing shared. This is wisdom and something AI will never obtain. The up-and-coming programmers and engineers using AI for everything will never learn these lessons because they won't be exposed to the problems or really forced to think about these outcomes.

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

#16

Post by tommy29tmar »

JimsonYang wrote: post #9

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

I’d read it that way. The issue is not that Claude can delete things; it’s that one session apparently had enough access to touch prod, run destructive commands, and also wreck the rollback path. Staging/prod separation helps, but backups should be on a different set of credentials too. Otherwise “restore it” is just another action the agent can damage.

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

#19

Post by kioleanu »

JimsonYang wrote: post #9

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

AI identified a problemm namely a credential missmatch and it decided it needs to delete a volume in order to fix that. Then it went and searched inside the whole codebase for a token that allows it to do that, found a production token meant for something else and issued the deletion request with said production token.

On the other end, the cloud company had something, _by design_, that also deletes any backups if you delete the volume.

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