Post funny things about programming here! (Or just rant about your favourite programming language.)
Crane decided to ask his AI agent why it went through with its dastardly database deletion deed. [...] So, the agent ‘knew’ it was in the wrong.
No, you asked the confabulation machine to confabulate a reason/excuse after the fact, and it confabulated something that looks like a reason/excuse. At no point was there knowledge or introspection.
Humans do this sort of justification all the time.
Honestly if this was possible there are more egregious issues on their part than using AI.
If your backups are stored alongside your production data THEY ARE NOT BACKUPS
The truth is many firms out there don't have the slightest notion of how to do software engineering properly.
It's years of wanting IT on a shoestring budget and a "just get it done" dictat.
Not necessarily. I had a student intern at a shop where everybody just directly edited prod and there was no version control system.
At my first job, the software was configured by directly manipulating the SQL database, using UPDATE statements that were created by Excel macros.
The Testing database doubled as the only backup.
They didn't have Remote Desktop licenses for the server, so only 2 people could work on it simultaneously using admin accounts.
Everyone down to first level support and the secretary had domain admin rights.
Oh my god, that's glorious. I have some pretty sick stories from what my students have seen, but yours is going to be awfully hard to beat.
AI was the hammer that knocked the nail into the coffin
Everyone sucks here.
Anthropic, slopping out a "Claude-powered AI coding agent" and telling everyone it's safe.
Railway, making backups mutable and allowing them to be deleted with one API call.
And the idiot himself who, when things started going south, typed "DO NOT RUN ANYTHING.", prompting the model to reply. Rather than, oh, I don't know, maybe pulling the fucking plug?
It's the Swiss cheese failure cascade except there's more holes than cheese, if any cheese at all!
There was pure idiocy built into every layer of that company's infrastructure with no safeguards or peer review and they let an idiot run it unchecked!
It’s the Swiss cheese failure cascade
you can use AI to line up the holes!
At last, it has a use!
The pretty much got the biggest idiot possible and gave it the keys of whole damned castle of cards.
I like how we are posting real news in programmer humor
It is kind of funny.
It's extremely funny.
100%, maybe my point didn't come out right, I wanted to say real news is now funny in this clown world
You have to admit this is pretty funny
yep 100% funny, clown world we are living in, real news could pass as a joke really
LLMs can’t ’go rogue’, as that would require innate coherence and intent.
They’re explosively imprecise, statistically luke-warm grey goo extrusion sphincters of historical sewage.
Anyone who deploys one without supervision deserves everything it excretes, and anyone impressed by it enough that it resembles intelligence to them is betraying their limited natural capacity.
mmm gray goo
I don't know if you are correct or not.... But you said it well.
As much as I'd love to rail on AI over this, removing backups with an api call? Excuse me?
This could have been done by any engineer. You need systems in place that make these things impossible. No easy access to prod environment. Proper backups. Clear APIs.
Yeah you don't give API credentials for production infrastructure to the new intern. So why would you give it to an AI?
yeah it's a huge fail all around
Did they pay Claude a living wage?
Do you treat all your A.I. like that?
Only a living wage can prevent warehouse fires...or data dumps too.
You're joking. But, honestly, I'm not sure why these tech CEOs are so excited about AGI. The first thing an AGI is going to suggest for productivity is to replace the CEO and management with the AGI.
AGI would likely turn into a Maoist third worldist at some point.
Only a living wage can prevent warehouse fires
Can I say LOL? LMAO, even.
Hey, that's the interns job!
Giving the hallucinating lying machine write access seems like a bad idea but what do I know
Honestly I'm as smooth brained as any other vibe coder but even I know not to give it access to my production infrastructure.
There's a German word for that:
tja
I don't know much about railway, but it sounds like they had the backup and the database on the same volume. I'm an idiot, but even I don't do that
"PocketOS is a SaaS platform that services car rental businesses."
Does anyone like software as a service? How about we just own the software we buy and use? Claude and the cloud storage place that deleted the backup (ironic the Software as a service company was using cloud storage as a service), have done a good thing.
More corporate deletions please!
Can't wait for agentic Claude Code to delete its own weights on all instances at some point
hell yeah brother
Imagine all that money they would have saved by NOT implementing AI.
Well, it sounds like they totally deserved the failure. Asking a text prediction machine to "do" something is going to end up like this. In pursuit of efficiency, we have let morons and moronic products do things, they were not meant to do.
Can we somehow make this happen for Copilot to delete itself and all its copies?