There was a point where a coworker came to my team, complaining that our policies had erased an entire week's worth of high-priority work on him.
We asked where this happened. He had done his work on an EC2 instance named `temp-worker-5`.
We asked where the files on that EC2 instance were; maybe we could cleverly get them back off the disk. They were in `/tmp`. We had it mounted on tmpfs (in memory), and we were running tmpreaper to clean out `/tmp` every Sunday.
When presented with the sheer absurdity of doing work on an instance called `temp`, out of a directory called `/tmp`, he backed down...
I fear that we wouldn't be so lenient (or rational) on my team had an AI agent done this - we'd have to enable the AI, after all.
Most interns would not be dumb enough to try it. Because there would be consequences, and there is training. The pre-trained entity, that everyone has been screaming is as smart as your intern, though?
Not an intern, but when I was a new hire on a trading desk I dropped the dividend database that we used to price options. Cost the desk a boatload before we stopped offering quotes, after which the day was a total loss. That’s the sort of fuckup that lands in the CEO’s report.
I understood what I did ex post facto, it was an honest—if stupid—mistake, I expected to get fired and instead was given everyone’s shit work for six months during which I learned a tonne. One of my tasks was redesigning the system so a single careless keystroke couldn’t do that during the trading day.
Doesn't back it up properly. There are too many people, otherwise bright and professional, who do not realise that simply syncing to somewhere else is not an adequate backup arrangement.
This problem predates agent based work. Anything an AI agent can accidentally do, malware could purposefully do too, as could a sufficiently careless human (one of the things my backups are intended to protect me from, is me!).
Should be mentioned that this was in the 90s with one of the first computer-animated feature films. We're missing the source code for a ton of games from that era as well. I would assume people had learned to have proper backups 30 years later - especially so with the advantage of high speed internet.
I always thought that delete doesn't really exist? In the sense that it you take the hard drive to a specialist they can often recover it? Maybe I am wrong?
You aren't wrong, but getting a specialist to look at it in a tight timeframe is expensive. Free tools exist, but if you've not already learned how to use them the time that you need them is a bad time to start. Anything you do with the machine after the delete can reduce the amount you are able to get back, so you should very quickly shut down (avoiding saving anything locally). The situation can be worse with SSDs, depending on how eager your OS/filesystem is at TRIMing deallocated blocks.
You could ask the agent to attempt to recover using specific tools. But yes in some cases the bits could be lost without the ability to recover, there are ways to destroyy data as it is usually required for decommissioning
Modern version of "the dog ate my homework"? I can't even imagine a scenario where an AI agent manages to unrecoverably delete all working material and backups. I'm cynical and can't help thinking it's all marketing to postpone a reality show no one cared about.
All these "accidents" with agents just makes me want to use them less, not more. Then again, I don't use agents because they consume tokens at an absurd rate, so...
It does matter because more people use agents and don't expect such rogue behavior. Plus there is more novelty, which "news" is somewhat related to. But regular human destruction also gets published and discussed
We asked where this happened. He had done his work on an EC2 instance named `temp-worker-5`.
We asked where the files on that EC2 instance were; maybe we could cleverly get them back off the disk. They were in `/tmp`. We had it mounted on tmpfs (in memory), and we were running tmpreaper to clean out `/tmp` every Sunday.
When presented with the sheer absurdity of doing work on an instance called `temp`, out of a directory called `/tmp`, he backed down...
I fear that we wouldn't be so lenient (or rational) on my team had an AI agent done this - we'd have to enable the AI, after all.
Not an intern, but when I was a new hire on a trading desk I dropped the dividend database that we used to price options. Cost the desk a boatload before we stopped offering quotes, after which the day was a total loss. That’s the sort of fuckup that lands in the CEO’s report.
I understood what I did ex post facto, it was an honest—if stupid—mistake, I expected to get fired and instead was given everyone’s shit work for six months during which I learned a tonne. One of my tasks was redesigning the system so a single careless keystroke couldn’t do that during the trading day.
This problem predates agent based work. Anything an AI agent can accidentally do, malware could purposefully do too, as could a sufficiently careless human (one of the things my backups are intended to protect me from, is me!).
I know it's not the same thing because you lose comments, unused prototypes etc, but I still find it a fascinating use of the technology.
It very probably was, but it just reminded me of this oversight failure mode.
[1] https://thedailywtf.com/articles/the_brillant_paula_bean
Original, google translated: https://www-aftonbladet-se.translate.goog/nojesbladet/a/31oE...
From my earlier submission here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50084941
I'm guessing that if JavaScript were enabled, it would try to translate Swedish to English clientside in the browser.
(BTW, your own HN submission was auto-flagged for not being in English. I've vouched for it; not that it matters).
But who knows what the agent was trying to do. It could really have decided the TV show was so bad no one should see it. There's no details.
Or it's bad and it's tax evasion.
Or intentional
Fair play to the vendor of the agent if that were true, they've invented a model which instead of producing slop goes around erasing it. I approve!
It also duct taped their IT staff to their chairs and prevented them from taking any backups of their core IP.
Agents doesn't cause new problems, they reveal existing weaknesses.
Proper working backups. Proper IAM setup. With agents things can go wrong so much faster, the margins for allowed systemic/tech debt are shrinking.
Agents absolutely can and will cause (new) problems if they are unsupervised even with guard rails in place.
And if you trust "AI" marketing, it will take all our jobs and do them better than us.
You're probably a regular tech news reader and are aware of the limitations, while they aren't.
A production company should 100% have regular backups, even moreso than the average developer.
I know google has some manual process (forms) to request "undeletion" of personal Google Drive files.