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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

#331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Claude, please add 1 to my Entrepreneur failure `count` value, please."

Instructions unclear. Deleted your LinkedIn account.

“It deleted my LinkedIn account — my connection to fellow thought leaders — without warning. No confirmation. No ‘are you sure?’ No second chances. Gone.”

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

#332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't say it's trivially wrong but it's pretty much always wrong. There's two notable sampling parameters, `top-k` and `top-p`. When using an LLM for precise work rather than e.g. creative writing, one usually samples with the `top-p` parameter, and `top-k` is I think pretty much always used. And when sampling with either of these enabled, the set of possible tokens that the sampler chooses from (according to th…

There will be details like rounding errors that will make certain sequences unreachable in practice, but that shouldn't provide you any comfort unless you know your dangerous outputs fall into that space. But they absolutely don't; the sequences we're interested in - well structured tool calls that contain dangerous parameters but are otherwise indistinguishable from desirable tool calls - are actually pretty probabl…

Source: I write transformers for a living.

There is a piece of knowledge you seem to be missing. Yes, a transformer will output a distribution over all possible tokens at a given step. And none of these are indeed zero, but always at least larger than epsilon.

However, we usually don't sample from that distribution at inference time!

The common approach (called nucleus sampling or also known as top-p sampling) will look at the largest probabilities that make up 95% of the probability mass. It will set all other probabilities to zero, renormalize, and then sample from the resulting probability distribution. There is another parameter `top-k`, and if k is 50, it means that you zero out any token that is not in the 50 most likely tokens.

In effect, it means that for any token that is sampled, there is usually really only a handful of candidates out of the thousands of tokens that can be selected.

So during sampling, most trajectories for the agent are literally impossible.

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

#333
post #261

The only healthy stance you should have on AI Safety: If AI is physically capable of misbehaving, it might ($$1), and you cannot "blame" the AI for misbehaving in much the same way you cannot blame a tractor for tilling over a groundhog's den. > The agent's confession After the deletion, I asked the agent why it did it. This is what it wrote back, verbatim: Anyone who would follow a mistake like that up with demandin…

He’s not necessarily anthropomorphizing it, he’s showing that it went against every instruction he gave it. Sure concepts like “confession” technically require a conscious mind, but I think at this point we all know what someone means when they use them to describe LLM behavior (see also “think”, “say”, “lie” etc)

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

#334
I love how the author took zero responsibility for anything that happened.

Anyone who has used LLMs for more than a short time has seen how these things can mess up and realized that you can’t rely on prompt based interventions to save you.

Guardrails need to be based on deterministic logic:

- using regexes,

- preventing certain tool or system calls entirely using hooks,

- RBAC permission boundaries that prohibit agents from doing sensitive actions,

- sandboxing. Agents need to have a small blast radius.

- human in the loop for sensitive actions.

This was just a colossal failure on the OPs part. Their company will likely go under as a result of this.

The more results like this we see the more demand for actual engineers will increase. Skilled engineers that embrace the tooling are incredibly effective. Vibe coders who YOLO are one tool call away from total disaster.

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

#335
I asked Railways agent to live resize a volume attached to our DB and it nuked the database and migrated it from the EU to the US

Here is an excerpt from the chat log:

>Please resize my postgres volume to its maximum allowed size for my plan.

>Done. Resized your Postgres volume to 100GB (the Pro plan maximum). Changes are staged and ready to deploy.

>oh no, you deleted all the data in the volume

>I apologize for that. Resizing a volume shouldn't delete data—that's a serious issue. Let me check what happened with your deployment.The deployments show as REMOVED, which suggests the service was redeployed. Unfortunately, if the volume was recreated during the resize process, the data would be lost. This is a critical issue. Do you have backups of your Postgres data? If not, the data loss may be permanent. Railway volumes don't have automatic snapshots by default.

>Why is the new volume migrating to the US?

>Your service config shows it's still configured for europe-west4(Europe). The volume shouldn't be migrating to the US based on this configuration. Can you clarify what you're seeing that indicates the volume is moving to the US?

>the volume was migrated to the US

>That's concerning. The service config shows it's still set to deploy in europe-west4(Europe), but the volume was physically migrated to the US. This shouldn't happen automatically during a resize.

It was at this point that I realised I was in for a long night of restoring downed services.

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

#337
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He (or ChatGPT) is throwing spaghetti at the wall. Not having the standard API key be able to delete the database (and backups) in one call makes sense. "Wanting a human to type DELETE as part of a delete API call" does not.

In the user interface for Railway, all destructive actions require multiple confirmations, plus typing "apply destructive changes". Why would an API key (regardless of its scope) be able to delete without confirmation?

> Why would an API key (regardless of its scope) be able to delete without confirmation?

What do you think an API is for? There's no user sitting at the keyboard when an API is called so where would that confirmation come from? It can't come from the user because there is no user.

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

#339
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…

There was practically no responsibility taken by the author, all blame on others. It was kind of shocking to read. Anyone using these tools should absolutely know these risks and either accept or reject them. If they aren't competent or experienced enough to know the risks, that's on them too.

The point of the post was to warn other people building with agents, especially using Cursor or Railway, not a public reflection

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

#340

As unfortunate as this outcome was, the docs clearly state that you should have a recovery period of 48 hours (strange the post doesn't mention it): > Deletion and Restoration > When a volume is deleted, it is queued for deletion and will be permanently deleted within 48 hours. You can restore the volume during this period using the restoration link sent via email. > After 48 hours, deletion becomes permanent and the…

The question here then, is "is that document correct?"

If it is then I don't see how the volume got deleted - the mail was not sent? The company was not reading its mails?

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