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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

#961
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.

Agree that this is just crazy.

I'm surprised that they didn't discover this kind of failure beforehand, and the backups were 3 month old.

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

#962
post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think this is a minor point. It seems clear by this point that the author is clueless how even API works and are just trying to shift blame for third-parties instead assuming that they're just vibecoding their whole product without doing proper checks. Yes sure, there seems to be lots of ways this issue could have been mitigated, but as other comments said, this mostly happened because the author didn't do it…

I completely disagree. I think the author makes a fair point about safety concerns regarding AI tooling. The author sounds knowledgeable enough to me. Even if some of their suggestions are a bit crass, most of them aren’t. Railway should most definitely not be putting backups within the same volume (even if documented). AI should not have done that operation when they have explicit rules not to. The industry has a lo…

> The author sounds knowledgeable enough to me.

Nope, their complaint about having an API ask if you should delete or not clearly shows the author has no idea how API works. They could have said that a deletion API could require 2 different requests, one for the deletion request that returns a token and another for confirmation with the token returned by the first request, but this is not what they said so.

Also as others have said, this wouldn't have helped anyway because the AI could just call both APIs one after another and the result would be the same, especially if the first request returns "call this other endpoint with this token to confirm your deletion request".

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

#963

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 post and that paragraph in particular sound AI generated, that triple "No" is a big tell. I'd not be surprised if that confirmation complaint is just a random suggestion proposed by the AI that wrote this.

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

#965

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…

I have to agree here...of all things that went wrong here, I don't think the API surface is to blame. You need to have deterministic control & escalation mechanism on your agents whether they are calling an API or any other tool

[flagged]

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

#966
If your agents run on your own machines (behind a firewall, on-prem, wherever), they can't receive inbound HTTP from the platform. Might want to check out pilotprotocol.network. essentially solves this with persistent virtual addresses, NAT traversal built in, agents connect p2p.

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

#968
I've been building QueryBear (https://querybear.com) to fix the database part of this: instead of giving an agent your raw connection string, you give it a read-only MCP URL that only exposes the tables you approve and logs every query. The agent can still query your DB, answer business questions, help debug — it just can't delete anything.

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

#969
Am curious why most comments ignored the fact that Claude autonomously ignored its guardrails & issued a DELETE? This WILL happen across all transformer based LLMs. We aren't waiting for sh*t to happen-we have HiTL with client side h/w attested auth to confirm such actions. No static policies would've caught this-so, we built dynamic decision making to trigger gating. Read Google Research's paper "AI Agent Traps" to get an idea of the scope of the problems.
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