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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

#391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mostly, I agree with you. My complaint is that, when the ceiling fails, nobody says "Duh ceilings are supposed to fail, that's basic physics." Because that (1) helps nobody, and (2) betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of physics. And I do think it's stupid to wire an LLM to a production database. Modern LLMs aren't that reliable (at least not yet), and the cost-benefit tradeoff does not make sense. (What do you ev…

What is the right understanding of how LLMs work and what is the correct diagnosis?

As I said, I believe statistical physics is a very good intuitional guidance. Molecules move randomly. That does not mean a cup of water will spontaneously boil itself. Sometimes the probability of something happening is so low that even if it's not mathematically zero it does not matter because you'll never observe it in the known universe.

LLM generating each token probabilistically does not mean there's a realistic chance of generating any random stuff, where we can define "realistic" as "If we transform the whole known universe into data centers and run this model until the heat death of the universe, we will encounter it at least once."

Of course that does not mean LLMs are infallible. It fails all the time! But you can't explain it as a fundamental shortcoming of a probabilistic structure: that's not a logical argument.

Or, back to the original discussion, the fact that this one particular LLM generated a command to delete the database is not a fundamental shortcoming of LLM architecture. It's just a shortcoming of LLMs we currently have.

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

#393
post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's akin to saying that every molecules behave randomly according to statistical physics, so you should expect your ceiling to spontaneously disintegrate any day, and if you find yourself under the rubble one day it's just a consequence of basic physics. Except your ceiling can and will fall on you unless you take preventative measures, entirely due to molecular interactions within the material. Barring that, it i…

I have lived about 40 years beneath ceilings and never personally taken a preventative measure. I allow my kids to walk under not only our own ceiling, but other people's ceilings, and I have never asked those people if their ceilings were properly maintained.

Construction regulation is the preventative measure.

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

#394
post #390

As someone who uses quite a couple of different AI providers (codex, glm, deepseek, claude premium among others), i've noticed that claude tends to move too fast and execute commands without asking for permission. For example, if i ask a question regarding an implementation decision while it is implementing a plan, it answers (or not) and immediately proceeds to make changes it assumes i want. Other models switch to…

All the models I have used will frequently jump ahead a ton of steps and not verify any of its assumptions. From generating a ton of code output I didn't ask for, to making a ton of assumptions about what I'm working on without appropriate context.

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

#395
post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's akin to saying that every molecules behave randomly according to statistical physics, so you should expect your ceiling to spontaneously disintegrate any day, and if you find yourself under the rubble one day it's just a consequence of basic physics. Except your ceiling can and will fall on you unless you take preventative measures, entirely due to molecular interactions within the material. Barring that, it i…

I have lived about 40 years beneath ceilings and never personally taken a preventative measure. I allow my kids to walk under not only our own ceiling, but other people's ceilings, and I have never asked those people if their ceilings were properly maintained.

Your home almost certainly has preventative measures, including proper humidity and temperature control, structural reinforcement, etc.

I don't mean that you personally have taken those measures, but preventative measures have absolutely been taken. When they aren't, ceilings collapse on people.

See any sheetrock ceiling with a leak above it. Or look at any abandoned building: they will eventually always have collapsed floors/ceilings. It is inevitable.

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

#396
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…

It's as if they internalized a post-mortem process that is designed to find root causes, but they use it to shift blame into others, and they literally let the agent be a sandbag for their frustrations. THAT SAID, it does help to let the agent explain it so that the devs perspective cannot be dismissed as AI skepticism.

No, the only way to know what the agent did is logs.

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

#397
> This isn't a story about one bad agent or one bad API.

No, it's about one irresponsible company that got unlucky. There are many such companies out there playing Russian roulette with their prod db's, and this one happened to get the bullet.

But hey all this publicity means they'll probably get funding for their next fuckup.

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

#399
So it's railways and the AI's fault, meanwhile your backups are 3 months old?

> Our most recent recoverable backup was three months old.

I'm sorry, but I expect you guys to be writing your precious backups to magnetic tape every day and hiding them in a vault somewhere so they don't catch fire.

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

#400
AI slop strikes again.

>The agent itself enumerates the safety rules it was given and admits to violating every one. This is not me speculating about agent failure modes. This is the agent on the record, in writing.

Yeah, sorry. Computers can't be held responsible and I'm sure your software license has a zero liability clause. Have fun explaining how it's not your fault to your customers.

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