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The lesson: AI cannot bridge an air-gapped backup. This could all be prevented with a crappy portable hard drive from costco.
The best prevention is not letting it happen in the first place. If your backup is a crappy portable hard drive from costco, you get what you buy, I wouldn't have much faith on that either.
The best prevention is not letting it happen in the first place.
Ya think?! We’re past that.
Completely unnecessary for you to preemptively assume someone would choose a “crappy” backup from a retail store when in fact such a backup would still likely have saved the day, and any half-decent dev should at least have some kind of RAID backup on site and better yet an offsite one too.
The flaw was not having any backup, not your straw man of a poor quality choice.
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But ai is s good thing! /s
AI is like a circular saw. Are circular saws useful?
Of course.
Can you cut your entire hand off if you don’t use it correctly? Absolutely.
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We don't need cautionary tales about how drinking bleach caused intestinal damage.
The people needing the caution got it in spades and went off anyway.
Or maybe the cautionary tale is to take caution dealing with the developers in question, as they are dangerously inept.
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Jesus Christ people. Terraform has a plan output option to allow for review prior to an apply. It's trivial to make a script that'll throw the json output into something like terraform visual if you don't like the diff format.
I've fucked up stuff with Terraform, but just once before I switched to a rudimentary script to force a pause, review, and then apply.
This is like blaming the gun for killing people.
Uhhh not really. Guns don't just go off by themselves.
ITT: nerds who have never held a gun in their life.
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but should serve as a cautionary tale.
Jesus there's a headline like this every month, how many tales people need to learn???
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sigh
Use LLMs as instructional models not as production/development models. It's not hard, people. You don't need to connect credentials to any LLMs just like you'd never write your production passwords on post-it's and stick them on your computer monitor.
Or don't use LLMs at all, because they fucking lie to you constantly?
Meh, they work well enough if you treat them as a rubber duck that responds. I've had an actual rubber duck on my desk for some years, but I've found LLM's taking over its role lately.
I don't use them to actually generate code. I use them as a place where I can write down my thoughts. When the LLM responds, it has likely "misunderstood" some aspect of my idea, and by reformulating myself and explaining how it works I can help myself think through what I'm doing. Previously I would argue with the rubber duck, but I have to admit that the LLM is actually slightly better for the same purpose.
Hooray for outsourcing of critical thinking!
What could possibly go wrong
I think you've misunderstood the purpose of a rubber duck: The point is that by formulating your problems and ideas, either out loud or in writing, you can better activate your own problem solving skills. This is a very well established method for reflecting on and solving problems when you're stuck, it's a concept far older than chatbots, because the point isn't the response you get, but the process of formulating your own thoughts in the first place.
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Mistakes happen. But how do you go 2.5 years without proper backups?
It’s so easy. I can’t tell you how many “backed up” environments I’ve run into that simply cannot be restored. Often people set them up, but never test them, and assume the snaps are working.
Backups are typically only thought about when you need them, and by then it’s often too late. Real backups need testing and validation frequently, they need remote, off-site storage, with a process to restore that as well.
Been doing this shit for 30 years and people will never learn. I’d guess 9 out of 10 backup systems that I’ve run into were there to check a box on an audit, and never looked at otherwise.
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this post was submitted on 07 Mar 2026
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