Technology

Sure — as with every tool. Hammers are great for many things, but don’t do all that well driving screws. Money is one of the most used tools humans have ever devised, but you can’t use it for everything.

AI in coding may only be good for a finite set of situations — but that set is massive. You’re dealing with regular languages that can be mathematically proven to be correct (in the sense that they will generate a working program, and not in the sense that they program will in fact function the way the user intends). This is a less open-ended scenario than something like an AI generated video, and so it’s easier for AI to excel at it, especially for non-novel algorithms.

But if you use it like an idiot, you’re going to get burned — and this guy was an idiot who doesn’t understand what he’s doing, or the tools researchers in software development have made over the last few decades. AI shouldn’t be touching your production environment — at all. And it shouldn’t have to — code needs to be stored in a versioning source repository of some sort (and backed up so you are unlikely to ever lose it), deployment needs to be fully scripted and should be able to rebuild your environments from scratch (from code right to production), and developers and development tools (like AI tools) should only have access to development environments, and not production environments.

So unless you’re a total dumbass, an AI agent (or even a shitty human developer) should never have the kind of access to do what happened here. They violated some pretty basic principals of software development, and got burned. This guy sawed his own hand off because he misused the tools to take a bunch of shortcuts, without building in any backups or reproducibility. The AI isn’t the proximal fault here — trusting it when you have no way to reproduce your environment when things go wrong is the problem, and that’s 100% on the human sitting at the keyboard (PEBKAC).