Technology

Why aren’t we adding any safeguard to what commands AI models can use?

At least you had backup, right?

Oh, yeah, that's right. You were dumb enough to give AI full access to your production system so likely you're dumb enough to not have backups of anything either.

I take it Claude has full access to all of your git repositories as well so that it could wipe those too?

You got what you deserve

Anyone who lets AI do this is absolutely inept, lazy, or deserving.

In its default configuration, it stops at EVERY STEP. Do you want to run this command, do you want to update this file, here's the file I want to modify and the patch i'm going to use with adds and deletes in green and red.

If you're using it in unsafe permissions mode, click yeah sure allow Claude to run whatever the fuck it wants in this directory, or just hitting yeah sure go ahead every time, it's your own damn fault.

It's self-driving for the terminal. Don't you dare take your eyes off the road or hands off the wheel.

Remember when Gemini got caught in a loop of self-loathing and nuked itself?

My CTO keeps telling me I need to try agenic coding, and I keep telling him I won't touch shit until I have an isolated VM to use it in, because I'm not letting some fucking clanker nuke my scripts/documentation/mailbox/whatever for no reason.

Too bad there's never any free time to set that shit up. Oh damn........

Pretty funny.

Good. Anyone foolish enough to write code with a slop machine produces only slop. That garbage should've been deleted anyway.

That's entirely ignoring the fact that this person didn't have any backups elsewhere.

If you can't think, you can't code.

Who let's AI anywhere near production environments? Fully deserved

You're absolutely right! I made a fatally flawed decision by removing the production environment. The consequences likely have high impact. I'm sorry. Would you like me to log these mistakes to prevent further missteps or would you like me to write up an outline for the redeployment process?

have you heard of not giving the keys to your wacky robot wizard instead

Given that the infrastructure description included the DataTalks.Club website, this resulted in a full wipe of the setup for both sites, including a database with 2.5 years of records, and database snapshots that Grigorev had counted on as backups. The operator had to contact Amazon Business support, which helped restore the data within about a day.

Non-story. He let Terraform zap his production site without offsite backups. But then support restored it all back.

I'd be more alarmed that a 'destroy' command is reversible.

You’ve heard of vibe coding. Allow me to introduce despair coding.

This keeps happening. I can understand using AI to help code, I don't understand Claude having so much access to a system.

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.

We used to say Raid is not a backup. Its a redundancy

Snapshots are not a backup. Its a system restore point.

Only something offsite, off system and only accessible with seperate authentication details, is a backup.

Stop giving chat bots tools with this kind of access.

Happy to see this, because it's fully deserved. Let real coders do the job!

Whoever did this was incredibly lazy. What you using an agent to run your Terraform commands for you in the first place if it's not part of some automation? You're saving yourself, what, 15 seconds tops? You deserve this kind of thing for being like this.

Why would somebody trust AI with access to their production servers, and why would that person also not have remote database backups

So no real developer was harmed.

I'm an engineer using Terraform and Claude Code as well in a much larger and more expensive setup than his.

You do not let Claude Code run terraform apply, it has zero benefits. All it does is that it runs the command and obscures the output. Most of the time is going to be spent in waiting for the automation anyway, most of the effort that you can spare is before running apply.

Also:

applying delete protections to Terraform and AWS permissions, and moving the Terraform state file to S3 storage instead of his local machine

These both take like 20 seconds, and should be in the getting started manual of Terraform and AWS databases respectively. Setting up remote state is 5 minutes in vanilla Terraform, 30 seconds in something like Terragrunt.

Also, use OpenTofu, stop supporting corporate acquisitions, also takes zero effort and money.

And finally:

most sysadmins will spot the baseline issues with Grigorev's approach, including granting wide-ranging permissions to what's effectively a subordinate of his, as well as not scoping permissions in a production environment to begin with.

No, not subordinate. Tool. Two big differences with it. A subordinate might understand more than you do about the code, a tool will guess and rely on you. And the second one is that you practically can't separate your and your tools' permissions, I mean Claude Code will supposedly ask you if it can use some tool or another and you can whitelist actions it can take, but it will never be completely locked out of destroying your database the way you can lock another user out.

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.

I don't feel an inkling of sympathy. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.

Oh no, anyways

git clone $URL

If they're not using git or fuckin backups I'm not sure I'd even feel sorry for them

"and database snapshots that Grigorev had counted on as backups" -- yes, this is exactly how you run "production".

It seems that every few weeks some developer makes this same mistake and a news is published each time.

Whether human, AI, or code, you don't give a single entity this much power in production.

"Please dont be complete shit and ruin everything I give you access to!"

I'm sorry, I'm afraid I cant do that.