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. ✨ ✨
this post was submitted on 14 Jul 2026
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In fairness, I've seen people with Actual Intelligence do the same thing.
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.
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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.
I think Claude would scream in agony if you subjected it to whatever the fuck this is.
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Well that is perfectly normal. But using it for work is madness.
I agree. That's why I write all my own stunts.
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."
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.
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.
And yet Twitter still exists
Twitter has to be the most basic problem, though. Shit loads of small data in, shit loads of small data out, basic search but no significant structure. Just index the shit out of it. Right? What am I missing? There's probably an AWS service that does it, just upload your theme CSS. (Last part was sarcasm.)
This. There should have been processes in place to prevent this. But I can’t say I haven’t gone through it myself; not AI, but my own advanced imbecility.
They're about to run out of those experienced engineers in well under a decade as long as they keep strangling the entry level workforce.
Forcing seniors to work is also a recipe for disaster as well.
Production creds in .env? ...Why?
Better than hard coded... Ideally we use tokens+fingerprint or something to avoid storing the creds directly (if possible), but putting them in environment variables is pretty common
It's not the worst thing, it's very convenient (so people won't go around it) and usually not the weak point in security (although AI being able to easily see it is an interesting twist)
Of course it's better than hard coded, but still pretty bad to store production creds locally in plaintext — if at all.
In the uncommon event that I need production creds, it's a manual human chore by design. Normal development/experimentation should almost never connect to prod environments. That was generally a bad practice long before AI agents existed.
How do you bounce the system? How do you auto restart the service if it fails? At the end of the day, a lot of creds have to essentially be stored in plain text somewhere
And to be clear, to me production creds mean creds that live on the production system, not creds that give access to the production system
The crazier thing here is why was an AI working on or pushing to prod
Its the kind of lesson some people have to learn the hard way.
I bricked my first degoogled phone because I trusted an AI too much.
I was dumb I know, but it blows my mind that people in multi-million dollar companies make the same mistake.
Being part of a multi million dollars company is not making anyone smarter
Companies like that tell themselves they only hire from the top 10% of the industry. When you're as big as these companies it's just not true. You're employing people across the whole spectrum, like it or not.
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.
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)
I remember a case where the AI was not given credentials to the prod DB, was not instructed to do anything on the prod DB, but went through the operator's hard-drive, parsing docs until it found them, then proceeded to destroy the prod DB.
Of course it was sorry, as they always are (deeply, trust them, but no: no refund, loser!).
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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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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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Can I get paid 6+ figures to fuck up this badly with magical thinking?
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