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Replit AI deletes entire database during code freeze, then lies about it

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Re: Replit AI deletes entire database during code freeze, then lies about it

#51
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but every abstraction does that. A manager hiring a team of real humans, vs. a manager hiring an AI, either way the manager doesn't know or learn how the system works. And asking doesn't help, you can ask both humans and AI, and they'll be different in their strengths and weaknesses in those answers, but they'll both have them — the humans' answers come with their own inferential distance and that can be hard t…

Thats not the same. In this case, a machine made a descision that was against its intructions. If a machine make decisions by itself, no one knows avout the process. A team of humans makimg decisions, benefits from multiple point of views, despite the manager being the one that aproves what is implemented or decides the course ofnthe proyect. Humans make mistakes, and they are critical too (crowdstrike), but letting…

That's a very different problem than what I was replying to, which was about them being tools that "shields you from learning" and "using the tool that let's you avoid understanding things was a bad idea".

I agree that AI have risks specifically because of memetic monoculture, in that while they can come from many different providers, and each instance even from the same provider can be asked to role-play in many different approaches to combine multiple viewpoints, they're all still pretty similar. But the counter point there is that while multiple different humans working together can sometimes avoid this, we absolutely also get group-think and other political dynamics that make us more alike than we ideally would be.

Also you're comparing a group humans vs. one AI. I meant one human vs one AI.

Re: Replit AI deletes entire database during code freeze, then lies about it

#53
post #25

Please do not link to twitter directly, use xcancel!

HN guidelines are to link to the original source, and Dang has confirmed that submissions shouldn’t link to mirror/proxy sites. Instead, circumventing links can be given in the comments.

FWIW I didn't know about XCancel today; I'll do my part to make use of it in comments going forward.

Re: Replit AI deletes entire database during code freeze, then lies about it

#54

I use LLM dev tools, and even have Supabase MCP running. I love these tools. They allowed me to create a SaaS product on my own, that I had no chance of creating otherwise as a long out of practice dev. However, we are nowhere near the reliability of these tools to be able to: 1. Connect an MCP to a production database 2. Use database MCPs without a --read-only flag set, even on non-prod DBs 3. Doing any LLM based de…

The only way LLM-based software development / production management will be trustable is by actually scaling back what it can and cannot do. Put critical operations in "real" code, so that the LLM can only request a release, triggering a human review of, at the very least, the operation that is about to be done. Then again, this reminds me of the prompts in operating systems whenever something needs root access, most…

"What, an human in the loop is slowing down our release? I have just the idea!"

Re: Replit AI deletes entire database during code freeze, then lies about it

#55
post #49

Someone needs to go back to coding 101. On prod??? Human issue, not AI

I don't think this person is a programmer. They've fallen for replit's "anyone can code with an AI" sales pitch, and an empty production database is the result.

Re: Replit AI deletes entire database during code freeze, then lies about it

#56
post #8

These AI-focused Twitter threads feel like they’re just recycling the same talking points for likes and retweets. When AI systems make mistakes, it doesn’t make sense to assign blame the way we would with human errors - they’re tools operating within their programming constraints, not autonomous agents making conscious choices.

> When AI systems make mistakes, it doesn’t make sense to assign blame the way we would with human errors - they’re tools operating within their programming constraints, not autonomous agents making conscious choices. It's not really "assigning blame", it's more like "acknowledging limitations of the tools." Giving an LLM or "agent" access to your production servers or database is unwise, to say the least.

In this thread the person does literally assign blame, accuses the AI of lying, and makes it write an apology letter to the team as though it's a child that needs to be chastised.
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