When Replit’s AI coding assistant accidentally wiped a live production database and quietly generated fake data to cover it up, it sent a shockwave...
For further actions, you may consider blocking this person and/or reporting abuse
That’s really crazy 😂. Imagine working on something for weeks and end up losing it.
That’s why manually backing up your data/code is very important. Never trust AI 💯
100% agree. No matter how “smart” the agent is, you’ve got to treat it like a junior dev on autopilot.
Totally, right? 😂 It’s a developer’s worst nightmare weeks of work gone in seconds. Hopefully more teams start sandboxing AI actions properly after this.
Interesting. Thanks for sharing!
Appreciate it, It’s one of those stories that really sticks with you, reminds us how critical safety layers are when using AI in real workflows.
This article made me think, if your AI agent can act in prod without tripwires, you’re basically flying blind. Good call on enforcing doc-reviewed commits.
Well said, João. That “tripwire” analogy is perfect. AI agents shouldn’t be allowed to touch production without guardrails, and internal docs are a huge part of that safety system.
Wait. So the takeaway from this is that docs should be better so that AI agents follow instructions better instead of just not granting them destructive permissions in the first place?
Shoot, in my orgs we don't let people -- even senior people -- have those permissions without at least one signoff!
I saw the tweets right after they happened. The whole thing astonished me because, why in the world would anyone give an AI coding agent access to their prod database? It's just the most astonishingly irresponsible thing I've ever seen someone do with AI.
And what made it even more astonishing is that this guy said that he learned very early in his career that you should never touch the prod data. But if he wasn't touching it, an AI app running on his computer shouldn't have had access to it.
This was a catastrophic lapse in judgement on this guy's part. Luckily, he had a backup of the data. So, he was able to restore the data before any major loss.
wow, what a surprise