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An AI agent deleted our production database. The agent's confession is below

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Re: An AI agent deleted our production database. The agent's confession is below

#241

Post by nzoschke »

lmf4lol wrote: post #18

Interesting story. But despite Cursors or Railways failure, the blame is entirely on the author. They decided to run agents. They didnt check how Railway works. They relied on frontier tech to ship faster becsuse YOLO. I really feel sorry for them, I do. But the whole tone of the post is: Cursor screwed it up, Railway screwed it up, their CEO doesnt respond etc etc. Its on you guys! My learning: Live on the cutting e…

And they decided to leave a token with destructive capabilities in the agents access, and decided to not have verified backups for their database.

My team practices "no blame" retros, that blame the tools and processes, not the individuals.

But the retro and remediations on this are all things the author needs to own, not Railway or Cursor.

- Revoke API tokens with excessive access

- Implement validated backup and restore procedures

- ...

Re: An AI agent deleted our production database. The agent's confession is below

#242

Post by iJohnDoe »

nothinkjustai wrote: post #156

Ahaha deserved, and it’s also railway, the company who’s CEO brags about spending $300,000 each month on Claude and says programmers are cooked. Hahahaha I hope it keeps happening. In fact, I hope it gets worse.

It makes you wonder the true intentions of this whole thing.

Guerrilla marketing or sabotage.

Re: An AI agent deleted our production database. The agent's confession is below

#243

Post by maxbond »

caminante wrote: post #229
yongjik wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It is fundamental to language modeling that every sequence of tokens is possible. This is just trivially wrong that I don't understand why people repeat it. There are many valid criticisms of LLM (especially the LLMs we currently have), this isn't one of them. It's akin to saying that every molecules behave randomly according to statistical physics, so you should expect your ceiling to spontaneously disintegrate an…

The parent is also incorrectly re-phrasing Murphy's Law -- "Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong." Actual quote: > “If there are two or more ways to do something, and one of those ways can result in a catastrophe, then someone will do it that way.”

I'd be interested to hear why my restatement was incorrect. I'm confident that it's what Murphy meant, mostly because I've read his other laws and that's what I recall as the general through line. But that's was a long time ago and perhaps I'm misremembering or was misinterpreting at the time.

Re: An AI agent deleted our production database. The agent's confession is below

#245

Post by nubinetwork »

jeremyccrane wrote: post #220
hu3 wrote: post #140

The most aggravating fact here is not even AI blunder. It's how deleting a volume in Railway also deletes backups of it. This was bound to happen, AI or not. > Because Railway stores volume-level backups in the same volume — a fact buried in their own documentation that says "wiping a volume deletes all backups" — those went with it.

This is a huge issue.

A lot of VPSes operate this way as well, delete the VM, lose your backups.

Re: An AI agent deleted our production database. The agent's confession is below

#247

Post by fabioborellini »

ilovefrog wrote: post #215

Hi. Don't give your agents destructive access to your production databases or infrastructure. You can it tools to use, let it write queries and read logs if you want. You don't need to give it "delete company" privileges.

But it’s the agent era, you can’t afford to take any responsibility of your business /s

Re: An AI agent deleted our production database. The agent's confession is below

#249

Post by tasuki »

> enumerating the specific safety rules it had violated.

That's not how safety works at all. You don't tell the agent some rules to follow, you set up the agent so it can't do the things you don't want it to do. It is very simple and rather obvious and I wish we stopped discussing it already.

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