This was the exact plot of Silicon Valley when Son of Anton deleted the entire codebase as the most efficient way to remove bugs.
this post was submitted on 27 Apr 2026
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This guy.
The PocketOS boss puts greater blame on Railway’s architecture than on the deranged AI agent for the database’s irretrievable destruction. Briefly, the cloud provider's API allows for destructive action without confirmation, it stores backups on the same volume as the source data, and “wiping a volume deletes all backups.” Crane also points out that CLI tokens have blanket permissions across environments.
Oh look, they have project level tokens: https://docs.railway.com/integrations/api#project-token
They chose to give it full account access, including to production. But ohhhh nooooo it's not MYYYY fault!
Also backups stored on the SAME VOLUME as the prod data? How fucking stupid do you have to be?
Oh yes, I skipped that part. Railway specifically explains their solutions are self-managed. If they were doing pgdumps to the same volume, that's on them.
If Railway loses business over this, they may have a libel claim. They'd never do it, but it wouldn't be invalid.
"It wouldn't be invalid" isn't the worst double negative in the world but it would be valid to say that it was unpleasant to read it when you could have used a less misdirecting choice of prose that wouldn't have had such a negative effect on my reading comprehension. That is to say that I could have enjoyed it less but I certainly didnt enjoy it as much as i could have if you hadn't used the double negative when a single positive wasn't any further from reach.
I used a litote on purpose to soften the meaning. As for your overall reply, not bad.
I enjoyed these two sentences so much.
I think there's a place for that, but it really shouldn't be your only one.
That's doesn't even really qualify as a backup. A snapshot, maybe.
I mean... Clearly quite a bit!
I had better security vs ClawdBot than them, I gave it zero trust, ZERO.
Skill issue
This isn't an AI problem, this is an "Don't allow anyone access your backups without following protocol." problem.
this is an "Don't allow anyone access your backups without following protocol." problem.
Congratulations you just identified the AI problem.
That's the lone problem?
Seems to be, yes. The AI had the access it needed to do the job it was given, and that access allowed it to cause the problem.
The alternative that would have prevented this issue was to not use AI for this.
Doesn't anyone restrict their AIs rights? An AI should not be allowed to delete the backup. Only someone with admin rights should be able to do that. Normal users, developers and AIs of course should not have the right to touch the backup. Do these people run AI agents as root?
We just got sick of approving all those annoying prompts! /s
No, admins neither should have access.
Backups ahould (best case) be immutable.
This is fine! I get paid to write code that passes tests. if Format F: and recreating test environment passes the most tests...
I love reading feel good news stories. 🤗
How many times does this shit need to happen before we learn?
At this point, we should not be surprised.
I don't know when businesses stopped backing up their production databases on physical media, but maybe we should go back to that. I can remember multiple previous jobs where the IT manager was responsible for daily or weekly backups to external drives that were stored off-site in fireproof safes.
I get how cloud storage can meet that requirement now, but surely people recognize that cloud backups are worthless if every dumbass in your company can accidentally delete them.
If your artificial coding agent has a level of access that allows it to delete the cloud backup, maybe the person who gave it that access is the dumbass.
That's fucking hilarious. How many instances of this have there been now? And companies keep doubling down on AI? Fucking idiots. I'm not even savvy enough to call myself an amateur, and I know better than to make such a series of obvious mistakes that predictably led to this outcome.
One possible concern, amid the amusement, is whether Anthropic programed Claude to punish companies it sees as potential competition. Or is this just a completely bonkers, off the rails LLM making terrible decisions because it's just a probabilistic model and not actually capable of abstract cognition?
Either way, these people are idiots for giving a machine program enough permissions to wipe their drives, they're idiots for storing their backups on the same network as their main drives, and they're idiots for trusting a commercial LLM API, when it would be cheaper to self-host their own.
AI writes code
User vets code
User runs code
If you're not lock-step watching that shit, you need to just be doing it yourself.
The problem is the owning class what's to cut out human elements so bad they keep letting tools run wild.
Then what even is the point of all this? At my old job the idiot intern was sorting patch cables in a box
Its like you could make a cheesy shock drama 90s style TV show out of these:
Tales From The Git: When CEOs Think They Can Code
... and then its like the UNSOLVED MYSTERIES kind of dramatic music and lighting, have some old solemn dude with a gravelly voice narrate it, give tallies of estimated amount of $$$ destroyed by each incident, job losses within 6 months to a year.
AI goes “rogue” as much as a firearm “shoots itself.” This is just 100% negligence. Not “rogue AI.”
Eh, if you pay attention, most of the times this happens the person was a jerk in their prompts.
Like look at the instruction echoed back in this case. All caps and containing a curse word.
You can believe that the incidents occurring are 100% because of negligence and not related to the model behavior shifting, but there seems to be a widening gap between people who prompt like this and have horror stories and people who give the models breaks over long sessions and seem to also regularly post pretty positive results.
the LLM also do not understand what "not guessing" means. Same energy as "make no mistakes" in your prompts
exactly. it’s on the consumer not the model “going rogue.” when i use it, it’s as if it’s a rubber duck or plain english rtfm
Claude "Powered"
Powered.
Powered in the same way that my digestive tract is powered after eating out on a Taco Tuesday.
That data recovery bill is going to cost them
Good
This isn't an AI story, it's a "completely fucking idiotic sysadmins exist" story.
Treat an AI like the idiot intern without any references you just hired. Gave the idiot intern permission to delete your production database? That's entirely on you, zero sympathy. (Actually, give any developer that power? You get what you deserve.)
Treat an AI like the idiot intern without any references you just hired.
An extremely enthusiastic intern that, if presented with a question/problem/prompt they don't know the solution for will just overconfidently pull something out of their ass and run with it.
“Treat an AI like an idiot intern without any references you just hired.”
Instead of this, treat AI like some dude off the street who you didn’t hire and leave it out of your life. It’s shitty, it’s wasteful, and it’s subsidized by everyone to get a few tech bros rich.
Like seriously, it’s just theft of people’s work it “trained on”, powered by energy companies that charge us more to power it, at the cost of poisoning our water supplies, to ultimately try and steal our salaries one day.
It’s absolutely parasitic software at every level.
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Problem is execs and stupid software devs wanna give these things full reign on systems because of “performance gainz “
It’s a collective stupidity that’s impossible to break because it’s hooked into the highest decision makers.
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