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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

#441

Post by sobellian »

827a wrote: 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…

The 'confession' is a CYA. Honestly the whole story doesn't really make sense - what's a "routine task in our staging environment" that needs a full-blown LLM? That sounds ridiculous to me. The takeaway is we commingled creds to our different environments, we gave an LLM access, and we had faulty backups. But it's totally not our fault.

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

#442

Post by dymk »

ad_hockey wrote: post #28

Minor point, but one of the complaints is a bit odd: > curl -X POST https://backboard.railway.app/graphql/v2 \ -H "Authorization: Bearer [token]" \ -d '{"query":"mutation { volumeDelete(volumeId: \"3d2c42fb-...\") }"}' No confirmation step. No "type DELETE to confirm." No "this volume contains production data, are you sure?" No environment scoping. Nothing. It's an API. Where would you type DELETE to confirm? Are the…

The whole tweet is AI slop, I doubt the human hitting "post" read through it all that closely. If they did, maybe they'd also go "Wait, that's nonsense".

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

#444

Post by gbnwl »

dpark wrote: post #345

I would never, ever trust my data with a company that, faced with this sort of incident, produces a postmortem so clearly intended to shift all blame to others. There’s zero introspection or self criticism here. It’s all “We did everything we possibly could. These other people messed up, though.” You can’t have production secrets sitting where they are accessible like this. This isn’t about AI. This is a modern “oops…

The entire post reads like it was generated via LLM as well.

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

#445

Post by dymk »

gigatree wrote: post #339
arcticfox wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It was also to put Cursor and Railway on blast and complain about how they should have safeguarded him from putting a gun to his database and pulling the trigger.

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

#446

Post by IceDane »

ad_hockey wrote: post #28

Minor point, but one of the complaints is a bit odd: > curl -X POST https://backboard.railway.app/graphql/v2 \ -H "Authorization: Bearer [token]" \ -d '{"query":"mutation { volumeDelete(volumeId: \"3d2c42fb-...\") }"}' No confirmation step. No "type DELETE to confirm." No "this volume contains production data, are you sure?" No environment scoping. Nothing. It's an API. Where would you type DELETE to confirm? Are the…

This person is a card-carrying moron and has no idea how anything works. Even if we concede that maybe there should be some grace period or soft deletions or whatever..

Also, the post is 100% written by an LLM, which is ironic enough on its own. But that then makes it a bit more curious that you find this argument in this slop, because any LLM would say so. But if you badger it enough, it will concede to your demands, so you just know this clown was yelling at his LLM while writing this post.

He really should've thrown this post at a fresh session and asked for an honest, critical review.

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

#447

Post by pessimizer »

jumpconc wrote: post #303
amluto wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Humans can do one thing that AI agents are 100% completely incapable of doing: being accountable for their actions.

You haven't met certain humans. Not all humans have internal capacity for accountability. The real meaning of accountability is that you can fire one if you don't like how they work. Good news! You can fire an AI too.

Bad news! They will not be aware that you have done this and will not care.

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

#448

Post by hdndjsbbs »

narrator wrote: post #413
xmodem wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't anthropomorphize the language model. If you stick your hand in there, it'll chop it off. It doesn't care about your feelings. It can't care about your feelings.

It's also important to realize that AI agents have no time preference. They could be reincarnated by alien archeologists a billion years from now and it would be the same as if a millisecond had passed. You, on the other hand, have to make payroll next week, and time is of the essence.

taps the "don't anthropomorphize the LLM" sign

They don't have time preference because they don't have intent or reasoning. They can't be "reincarnated" because they're not sentient, they're a series of weights for probable next tokens.

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

#449

Post by coldtea »

827a wrote: 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…

>Anyone who would follow a mistake like that up with demanding a confession out of the agent is not mature enough to be using these tools. Lord, even calling it a "confession" is so cringe. The agent is not alive. The agent cannot learn from its mistakes

The problem is millions of years of evolutionary wiring makes us see it as alive. Even those mature enough to understand the above on the conscious level, would still have a subconscious feeling as if it's alive during interactions, or will slip using agency/personhood language to describe it now and then.

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

#450

Post by coldtea »

hdndjsbbs wrote: post #448
narrator wrote: post #413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's also important to realize that AI agents have no time preference. They could be reincarnated by alien archeologists a billion years from now and it would be the same as if a millisecond had passed. You, on the other hand, have to make payroll next week, and time is of the essence.

taps the "don't anthropomorphize the LLM" sign They don't have time preference because they don't have intent or reasoning. They can't be "reincarnated" because they're not sentient, they're a series of weights for probable next tokens.

That is not that strong an argument as it seems, because we too might very well be "a series of weights for probable next tokens".

The main difference is the training part and that it's always-on.

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