They gave the AI the job of managing IaC for their environment. Then were shocked when the AI managed the environment incorrectly. This is absolutely not something you let a junior engineer anywhere near.
See, this is the piece of information I was missing. When the article says “routine tasks”, I didn’t think it meant “manage environment”.
In that case, I agree that it is an issue of trusting AI with something that it shouldn’t have been.
You seem to be suggesting that the AI should be able to do the job they gave it without being given the permission required for it to do.
No, I was simply mistaken about the job it was given. Like I said, all I had to work with was the tomshardware article, which doesn’t go into much detail. I didn’t know that the “routine task in staging” required permission to delete entire cloud volumes across all environments instead of just specific environment-scoped project tokens.
Obviously, if it’s tasked with managing all project environments and given the access to do so, that’s a timebomb. In this case, it was, until it blew up.
The thing about doing things in IT, is you need to have permissions to do the things you’re asked to do.
The thing about conversations on the Internet is you need to actually read the whole comment and realise that there may be some misunderstanding if the other party says things like “I can’t read the twitter link” and assumes it’s a junior dev job when you know it’s not. Then you could just point out the part they didn’t know without being condescending and assuming a fundamental lack of understanding of how IT works.
I’ve had more than enough instances of troubleshooting just which scopes my access token needs to be intimately familiar with the way permissions work. I personally tend to request the least amount required for a given task and only expand when needed and reasonable. It is my understanding that this is the best practice. It was my assumption that they had assigned permissions their agent didn’t need, because you generally don’t hand out “fuck up my prod system” rights.
No, I was simply mistaken about the job it was given. Like I said, all I had to work with was the tomshardware article, which doesn’t go into much detail.
The article goes into full detail. All of this information was in the article.
Then maybe it’s a knowledge / understanding issue, because I’ve trawled through the article multiple times seeing if I’d missed just that. What I do see is:
“deleted our production database and all volume-level backups in a single API call to Railway, our infrastructure provider” (implying permissions across all environments)
“The AI agent was set to complete a routine task in the PocketOS staging environment” (implying it needed (only) staging environment permissions, no description of specific “routine task”, no reason it would need productive access)
“I decided to do it on my own to ‘fix’ the credential mismatch” (This is the AI part of the fuckup: The decision to delete data over a credential issue is something even a Junior engineer probably wouldn’t jump to, so that’s on the AI and on Anthropic, whose safeguards failed)
What am I missing here? What is a “routine task in [a] staging environment”, why does it need admin permissions? Why does the agent have permissions for the prod environment if it’s supposed to work in the staging one?
See, this is the piece of information I was missing. When the article says “routine tasks”, I didn’t think it meant “manage environment”.
In that case, I agree that it is an issue of trusting AI with something that it shouldn’t have been.
No, I was simply mistaken about the job it was given. Like I said, all I had to work with was the tomshardware article, which doesn’t go into much detail. I didn’t know that the “routine task in staging” required permission to delete entire cloud volumes across all environments instead of just specific environment-scoped project tokens.
Obviously, if it’s tasked with managing all project environments and given the access to do so, that’s a timebomb. In this case, it was, until it blew up.
The thing about conversations on the Internet is you need to actually read the whole comment and realise that there may be some misunderstanding if the other party says things like “I can’t read the twitter link” and assumes it’s a junior dev job when you know it’s not. Then you could just point out the part they didn’t know without being condescending and assuming a fundamental lack of understanding of how IT works.
I’ve had more than enough instances of troubleshooting just which scopes my access token needs to be intimately familiar with the way permissions work. I personally tend to request the least amount required for a given task and only expand when needed and reasonable. It is my understanding that this is the best practice. It was my assumption that they had assigned permissions their agent didn’t need, because you generally don’t hand out “fuck up my prod system” rights.
The article goes into full detail. All of this information was in the article.
Then maybe it’s a knowledge / understanding issue, because I’ve trawled through the article multiple times seeing if I’d missed just that. What I do see is:
What am I missing here? What is a “routine task in [a] staging environment”, why does it need admin permissions? Why does the agent have permissions for the prod environment if it’s supposed to work in the staging one?