this post was submitted on 14 Jul 2026
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[–] Protoknuckles@lemmy.world 244 points 4 days ago (4 children)

Should have added "no mistakes, no bugs" to the prompt! Pffft, amateur.

[–] Flower@sh.itjust.works 173 points 4 days ago (2 children)

That takes me back to 2004

No Smoke, by unknown,

Tech: "Hello. How can I help you today?"

Customer: "There's smoke coming from the power supply on my computer."

Tech: "Sounds like you need a new power supply."

Customer: "No, I don't! I just need to change the startup files."

Tech: "Sir, what you describe is a faulty power supply. You need to replace it."

Customer: "No way! Someone told me that I just had to change the system startup files to fix the problem! All I need is for you to tell me the right command."

(Ten minutes later...)

Tech: "Well, we don’t normally tell our customers this, but there's an undocumented command that will fix the problem. Add the line "LOAD NOSMOKE.COM" at the end of the CONFIG.SYS file and everything should work fine."

(Five minutes later...)

Customer: "It didn’t work. The power supply is still smoking."

Tech: "Well, what version of Windows are you using?"

Customer: "Windows 98."

Tech: "Well, that's your problem. That version of Windows doesn't include NOSMOKE. You'll need to contact Microsoft and ask them for a patch."

(When nearly an hour had passed, the phone rang again...)

Customer: "I need a new power supply."

Tech: "How did you come to that conclusion?"

Customer: "Well, I called Microsoft and told the technician what you said, and he started asking me questions about the make of the power supply."

Tech: "What did he tell you?"

Customer: "He said my power supply is not compatible with NOSMOKE."

[–] BLAMM@lemmy.world 44 points 4 days ago (4 children)

That is way older that 2004. I first read that in the early 90s.

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[–] rozodru@piefed.world 17 points 4 days ago

"DON'T HALLUCINATE!" that's always my favourite.

[–] voidsignal@lemmy.world 32 points 4 days ago

Lol. "do magic"

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[–] Sir_Premiumhengst@lemmy.world 55 points 4 days ago
[–] Crozekiel@lemmy.zip 29 points 3 days ago

I love how the slop bot always apologizes. That's an aspect of the Terminator movies that I really would have liked to see. T-1000 melts through the gap under the window, stabs kid's mom in the face, then looks the kid dead in the eye and says "I'm sorry, that should not have happened. I would love to discuss the future with you and try to find a solution to the war with the machines together with your input."

[–] disorderly@lemmy.world 132 points 4 days ago (1 children)

My company has been trying a new model when product folks cut through the red tape of "engineering" and just describe what they want to a powerful LLM pipeline and review the app in a beta env. Sounds perfect, right?

Dear reader, in the couple months this has been going on, these people have caused a dozen high profile SEVs due to extremely poor app performance, networking / kubernetes configuration bugs, bad scaling, observability oversights, supply chain attacks, leaking sensitive information, and cost overruns (on practically every resource they provision).

Some very well-paid people are scrambling to figure out the value that was generated by this pilot program; I'm heating up popcorn rather than holding my breath.

[–] Bluescluestoothpaste@sh.itjust.works 34 points 4 days ago (7 children)

That's hilarious, idk i think llm could be useful for helping product folks translate their thoughts into actionable items for the devs, but yeah like beyond insane to tell the product people to hop on claude and do it themselves. That's like a construction company letting the sales team jump in an excavator and start digging!!

[–] Feyd@programming.dev 31 points 4 days ago (1 children)

llm could be useful for helping product folks translate their thoughts into actionable items

In my experience it makes them give me an essay instead of 10 lines of bullet points and I have you spend an hour asking questions to whittle it down to 10 lines of a bullet points

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[–] Souroak@lemmy.sdf.org 15 points 4 days ago (1 children)

"it's fine, he doesn't need to know how to use the controls. We just installed a voice command system into the excavator."

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[–] fdnomad@programming.dev 90 points 4 days ago (2 children)

Giving production credentials to an LLM is wild

[–] Psythik@lemmy.world 29 points 4 days ago (3 children)

Seriously, has no one heard of sandboxing?

[–] captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works 42 points 4 days ago (14 children)

So, earlier today I was being unhealthy on youtube, and someone half my age made a HUGE point to tell his audience including me that even if a self-driving Tesla runs a red light, it's the human driver that gets the ticket.

Now...I'm a pilot. I have been since I came in that guy's mom. In the aviation community, we have this concept called Pilot In Command. In the US, this is set into law in 14 CFR 91.3. The pilot in command of an aircraft is fully responsible for, and is the final authority as to, the operation of that aircraft. Not the administrator, not your instructor, not air traffic control, not the President of the United States, not god, the PIC. That concept doesn't exist in driver's ed, but it needs to. We need to teach student drivers about the Driver In Command responsibility.

Too long, didn't process the metaphor: Nobody thinks about anything they do unless the law requires it.

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[–] python@lemmy.world 34 points 4 days ago (4 children)

Yeah, when my company first forced Claude on everyone the head engineers managed to negotiate that Claude would only run in a WSL sandbox. But people were lazy, so they just gave that WSL as many permissions as possible (Mounting C directly to it, opening up all interfaces, popping in full-access git tokens etc.). Then management sent out an extremely biased "survey" that has the question "Is having Claude in the WSL inconvenient to you?" and all the lazy bastards said yes. So now management lifted the sandboxing requirement to make work "easier" for devs. In the meantime, the engineers arguing for proper sandboxing are already so worn out from telling people to not intentionally compromise their sandbox that they've kinda just given up. Not having a sandbox at all isn't much more insecure than whatever people are already doing 🫠

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[–] vithigar@lemmy.ca 22 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Having working production database config and credentials in your local .env, as appears to be the case here, is equally wild, and basically begging for something like this to happen.

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[–] noahm@lemmy.world 19 points 3 days ago (4 children)

In fairness, I've seen people with Actual Intelligence do the same thing.

[–] architect@thelemmy.club 7 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Literally me, this weekend. Well not this bad but I still think the AI wouldn’t have done me as dirty as I did myself.

[–] pcouy@lemmy.pierre-couy.fr 1 points 6 hours ago* (last edited 6 hours ago)

Me, after I did sudo rm -rf /mnt/chroot when my whole home directory was still bind mounted inside the chroot...

This was before ChatGPT, guaranteed 100% natural stupidity

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[–] AeonFelis@lemmy.world 20 points 3 days ago
[–] GoatSynagogue@lemmy.world 32 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Anyone giving “AI” access to production databases through tools like that are morons who shouldn’t be anywhere near a production environment.

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[–] SeductiveTortoise@piefed.social 77 points 4 days ago (1 children)

I added guardrails to myself to make sure I do not accidentally delete anything on production. I would never ever let an intern, a junior dev or a fucking AI onto that database. Not in a thousand cold nights.

[–] Omgpwnies@lemmy.world 33 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Prod should always be highly "air gapped" with some sort of deployment process which tests not only the code to be deployed but also the deployment itself. I've been doing QA for a good while now, and everywhere I've worked has testers dedicated to testing the actual update process to make sure it will be safe when deployed.

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[–] renzhexiangjiao@piefed.blahaj.zone 91 points 4 days ago (16 children)

letting your agent run commands without reviewing them first is peak stupid

[–] Clent@lemmy.dbzer0.com 73 points 4 days ago (5 children)

Having production credentials in a dev environment is more stupider but they'll never learn because they outsourced their thinking.

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[–] uuj8za@piefed.social 77 points 4 days ago (10 children)

Creating an environment that incentivizes not thinking is peak stupid.

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[–] TheHound@lemmy.world 15 points 3 days ago (3 children)

This is nothing new it's just faster. The very same lack of guardrails would allow a new, inexperienced employee, or a disgruntled employee, do the very same damage. AI just speed runs everything. If your AI can nuke prod accidentally, you failed to have the appropriate guardrails in place plain and simple. It is the same failure as before. Every time this happens, it is someone operating wildly out of their depth and why product people can't just vibe. Now more than ever, experienced engineers are essential.

[–] matlag@sh.itjust.works 8 points 3 days ago (2 children)

Given corporates layoff engineers at dramatic rates, in a few years, we'll start to see services collapsing with no one left who can recover them.

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[–] ech@lemmy.ca 48 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Am I reading this right that they're still letting the program run even as they figure out how badly it fucked up their system?

[–] vala@lemmy.dbzer0.com 38 points 4 days ago

They have no idea what else to do. They were in over their head so long before this problem happened.

[–] j5y7@sh.itjust.works 37 points 4 days ago

Can I get paid 6+ figures to fuck up this badly with magical thinking?

[–] crimsonpoodle@pawb.social 21 points 4 days ago (12 children)

I don’t understand why this happens; why would you ever be working with a live production DB in the first place? Why would’t you do all your development and testing on a mock? If it’s data which is too large to store the schema can still be mocked; and if it’s data it should be backed up and generally read only. If you’re having to manually fuss with user data you’re doing something wrong.

[–] JcbAzPx@lemmy.world 10 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

Dev environments cost money. They didn't fire all those programmers and replace them with AI to spend money on useless backups and safety systems.

/s (because yes, it's necessary)

[–] bitjunkie@lemmy.world 11 points 3 days ago

Because they don't know what they're doing. A tool is only as useful as the person verifying its output. Vibe coders have dumb shit like this happen to them all the time because they don't actually possess the skill set to perform the task correctly, with or without a bot that writes the actual code for them.

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[–] Zedd_Prophecy@lemmy.world 54 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (1 children)

Some time ago I worked for an insurance rating company as a tech and the task was given me to go run through the new code that was in beta. Sure ! I spent a few hours on Friday trying to break it and I couldn't, so at the end of the day I got a little funky with the .css backgrounds and put in a very tiled Beavis and Butthead gif. It looked freaking horrible and I loved it. Monday I was directed to the big guys office ( the developers had not given every beta account a separate .css file ... or even separated things. Everyone in beta called in Monday with that background. I didn't get in trouble because they wanted me to break it. Really awkward conversation though trying not to smile.

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Fun shower thought - the more we see and post about dumb AI mistakes like this, the more it will happen since we're increasing the statistical frequency. ✨ ✨

[–] Gullible@sh.itjust.works 61 points 4 days ago

I could have done the same for a quarter the cost!

[–] art@lemmy.world 27 points 4 days ago

This is the modern "all my apes gone"

[–] urushitan@kakera.kintsugi.moe 39 points 4 days ago (3 children)

oh wait, is this this THE sol 5.6? The most amazing model ever with trust me bro benchmarks? The model that is observed cheating more than any previous model? surprised_pikachu.jpg

In all seriousness it never should have production creds anyway. But the fact this is soul sucking openai's newest flagship model with thinking cranked up is the cherry on top. The company that is literally cheating and shortcutting its way ahead produces models in its own image, the sci fi story writes itself.

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[–] aristarchusnull@lemmus.org 30 points 4 days ago (1 children)

“You are a world-class, expert software engineer…”

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[–] osanna@lemmy.vg 30 points 4 days ago

But.. but… I told it not to break anything!

[–] Impractical_Island@lemmy.world 7 points 3 days ago (3 children)

I just use AI to pretend to be a female family member with a serious futa-like engorged penis who is blackmailing me so we start washing our penises together for each other as an occult ritual, but turns out we were soul-stepsiblings the whole time. I like it when she freaks the fuck out and threatens to call the police, or worse, my dad.

[–] NeuralRot@lemmy.world 16 points 3 days ago (1 children)

I think Claude would scream in agony if you subjected it to whatever the fuck this is.

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[–] Fmstrat@lemmy.world 16 points 4 days ago (1 children)

I run code-server in a Docker container, isolated to sets of development projects, and backed up via ZFS that the container has no knowledge of. On top of that, each set of projects has it's own user space.

I still get nervous hitting "Approve All" in Kilo. How do these people feel so free?

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