have you heard of not giving the keys to your wacky robot wizard instead
You’ve heard of vibe coding. Allow me to introduce despair coding.
Na this is vide ops. Anyone who thought a coding machine could do ops probably assumes anyone who codes can also do ops. It’s going to be making the same mistakes that have happened in DevOps.
Vibe ops is crazy lmaoo
To be fair, I use LLMs quite a bit in my home lab setup. For one, it’s a home lab, not exactly a prod setup for a company or whatever. Secondly, I obviously also don’t run commands without knowing what they’re doing, with a source that isn’t an LLM.
This keeps happening. I can understand using AI to help code, I don’t understand Claude having so much access to a system.
It’s because these idiots believe their own bullshit.
That’s honestly the most frightening part of all of this to me. How many of these people at the very tippy top pushing this stuff are suffering from cyber psychosis? How many of them have given themselves the covert mission to give AI the keys to the world at all costs because they’re mentally ill from their own technomagic trick?
I didn’t think the next-token guess machine would guess “delete my database”!
It seems that every few weeks some developer makes this same mistake and a news is published each time.
I don’t feel an inkling of sympathy. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
Has anyone tried a
deltree *.* /ywhen talking to claude? Revenge is a dish best served code.Lmao good.
You either have a backup or will have a backup next time.
Something that is always online and can be wiped while you’re working on it (by yourself or with AI, doesn’t matter) shouldn’t count as backup.
He did have a backup. This is why you use cloud storage.
The operator had to contact Amazon Business support, which helped restore the data within about a day.
AI or not, I feel like everybody has had “the incident” at some point. After that, you obsessively keep backups.
For me it was a my entire “Junior Project” in college, which was a music album. My windows install (Vista at that time - I know, vista was awful, but it was the only thing that would utilize all 8gb of my RAM because x64 XP wasn’t really a thing) bombed out, and I was like “no biggie, I keep my OS on one drive and all of my projects on the other, I’ll just reformat and reinstall Windows”
Well… I had two identical 250gb drives and formatted the wrong one.
Woof.
I bought an unformat tool that was able to recover mostly everything, but I lost all of my folder structure and file names. It was just like 000001.wav, 000002.wav etc. I was able to re-record and rebuild but man… Never made that mistake again. Like I said. I now obsessively backup. Stacks of drives, cloud storage. Drives in divverent locations etc.
AI or not, I feel like everybody has had “the incident” at some point. After that, you obsessively keep backups.
Yup!
Also totally unrelated helpful tip- triple check your inputs and outputs when using dd to clone a drive. dd works great to clone an old drive onto a new blank one. It is equally efficient at cloning a blank drive full of nothing but 0s over an old drive that has some 1s mixed in.
And that’s a great example where a GUI could be way better at showing you what’s what and preventing such errors.
If you’re automating stuff, sure, scripting is the way to go, but for one-off stuff like this seeing more than text and maybe throwing in a confirmation dialogue can’t hurt - and the tool might still be using
ddunderneath.
TestDisk has saved my ass before. It’s great at recovering broken partitions. If it’s just a quick format done with no encryption involved, you have a very high chance of having your stuff back. That’s of course if you catch yourself after doing just the format.
Other than that, yeah, I’ve also had my moments. Back in high school not only did I not have money for an external drive - I didn’t even have enough space on my primary one. One time a friend lent me an external drive to do a backup and do a clean reinstall - and I can’t remember the details, but something happened such that the external drive got borked - and said friend had important stuff that was only on that hard drive. Ironically enough it wasn’t even something taking much space - it was text documents that could’ve lived in an email attachment.
bad backup vibes there boss? backup was the task?
Nobody wants to point out that Alexey Grigorev changes to being named Gregory after 2 paragraphs?
Slop journalism at its sloppiest. I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that this story was entorely fabricated.
Naw, Alexey Grigorev is a real person, with a GiHub and everything, and he wrote a blog post about this very incident. The person writing the article just fucked up the name.
I’m surprised that you jumped to that conclusion without doing a 5-minute web search.
holy shit your right lol…good catch.
Makes me want to get out more so I can have real interaction with real peop-
sees people walking around with meta glasses
me: “Hey hows it going?”
person(GEMINI 35.84 INTERFACE): “Human is approaching you, facescan assumes awkward, potentially hostile, he isn’t tagged, there is no name above his head. do not speak with him”
person: turns and walks away silently in a creepy puppet manner
me: “What the actual fuck?”
GEMINI 35.84: “Uploading unknown face into database to Stargate for analysis, no match, law enforcement has been called”
News at 11: “A man has been incinerated by law enforcement in what officials are describing as a special unwanted persons removal operation”
this shit could become real in a few decades. funny and depressing as fuck.
That’s what version control is for.
Version control doesn’t do shit for your database. Snapshots/backups.
The developer is to blame. Using a cutting edge tool irresponsibly. I have made mistakes using AI to help coding as well, never this bad though. Blaming AI would be like blaming the hammer a roofer was using to hammer nails and slamming their finger accidentally with it. You don’t blame the hammer, you blame the negligence of the roofer.
The problem is this is the way it’s being pushed. This is how it’s being sold. There are no guardrails.
…… and that’s the biggest problem. I’m frustrated as hell on the commits I’ve had to unwind because someone doesn’t know how to check the changes before committing, then has it try to fix itself, again without checking on the changes , then again. It’s horrible.
…… and I’ve seen it too. Trying to have it do only code reviews - the ai points out useful things but then wants to commit a crapload of changes without going over it with me first.
…… and people are playing with mcp agents, which are really great for letting the ai get data from systems and integrate with those systems . But with few to no guardrails. There’s no no review, the user doesn’t necessarily follow what’s changing, it just gets done. Sometime badly very badly
We’re all focused on whether the ai works, and it does do a pretty good job with coding but the tools don’t keep the human in the loop, or humans don’t know how to stay on the loop
A developer having the ability to accidentally erase your production db is pretty careless.
An AI agent having the ability to “accidentally” erase your production db is fucking stupid as all fuck.
An AI agent having the ability to accidentally erase your production db and somehow also all the backup media? That requires a special course on complete dribbling fuckwittery.
Stop giving chat bots tools with this kind of access.
Wrong answer. If you don’t give them access, the alternative (ruling out not using AI because leadership will never go for that) is to hire high school kids to take a task from a manager, ask the ai to do it, then do what the AI says repeatedly to iterate to the solution. The problem with that alt is that it is no better than giving the ai access, and it leaves you with no senior tech people. Instead, you give it access, but only give senior tech people access to the AI. Ones who would know to tell the AI to have a backup of the database, one designed to not let you delete it without multiple people signing off.
Senior tech people aren’t going to spend thier time trying things an AI needs tried to find the solution. So if you don’t give it access, they won’t use it, and eventually they will all be gone. Then you are even further up shit creek than you are now.
The answer overall, is smarter people talking to the AI, and guardrails to stop a single point of failure. The later is nothing new.
What is this insane rambling?
The alternative is that the only thing with access to make changes in your production environment is the CI pipeline that deploys your production environment.
Neither the AI, nor anything else on the developers machine, should have access to make production changes.
I did say “and guardrails to stop a single point of failure.” A cicd pipeline itslef doesn’t protect you if it can change that too. You need the same kind of guardrails that would allow a junior dev to f things up. Require multiple people to sign off. Turn on deletion protection… those sorts of things. I work in infra, so I often have direct access to production. More than I should. But not all companies can afford to build out all the tools needed so that I don’t need production access.
The answer is no AI. It’s really simple. The costs for ai are not worth the output.
Good luck with that. Most search engines use AI now. Not only where you see it, but in finding the content to make it searchable. AI is here to stay. There are things it is good at, and things it isn’t. Learn what they are, and use it where it makes sense. Or stuck your head in the sand and see how that works put.
Nah. As a tech people, I am not going to give an llm write access to anything in production, period
Someone created that database. And all those other parts of the infra you use. AI is pretty good for that. But you have it turn on deletion protection, and set up a system that requires another person to approve turning it off. Or you can give it access at creation time, but remember to turn that access off when it is finished being verified.
What are you even talking about?
I’m in favour of hiring kids to figure out the solution through iteration and doing web searches etc. If they fuck up, then they learn and eventually become better at their job - maybe even becoming a Senior themselves eventually.
I get what you’re saying - Seniors are more likely to use the tools more effectively, but there are many cases of the AI not doing what its told. Its not repeatably consistent like a bash script.
People are better - always.
The days of stack exchange and such are numbered. Web searches turn up less and less hits that help you solve problems and learn. It won’t be long before AIs replace old school web searches. Software projects will stop writing documentation, when instead and ai can just read the code. The way we learned things is dieing. I don’t know how the juniors will get to be seniors in 5 to 10 years. But following th AI instructions to test out it’s theories isn’t going to work for the vast majority.
Do you go on an oncall rotation by chance? Because anyone that has to respond to night time pages would not be saying this lol.
I do in fact. Recently I have dodge the night time pages, but a few years ago I was up plenty of time in the night debugging issues. In many of those cases an AI would have been very helpful. Developers do far stupider things because they are sure they won’t break anything. But most of the pages were the result of not enough time spent to make the systems resilient. I dodged the pager currently because as a startup we had so few customers, we couldn’t afford to hire enough people to have a rotation. So I was sortof on call. Like the boss had my number, and if needed he would call it. But it never came to that, partly by luck, and partly because I know how to make things resilient. With the low load, resilient isn’t as hard.
No risk, no reward. People are desperate for these tools to help them success.
We’ve always been succeeding even without them. I don’t see why would anyone try to work in aiT if they don’t… Want to work lol
Success bigly, even.
