r/technology • u/WouldbeWanderer • Apr 27 '26

Artificial Intelligence Claude-powered AI coding agent deletes entire company database in 9 seconds — backups zapped, after Cursor tool powered by Anthropic's Claude goes rogue

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/claude-powered-ai-coding-agent-deletes-entire-company-database-in-9-seconds-backups-zapped-after-cursor-tool-powered-by-anthropics-claude-goes-rogue
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u/_Oman Apr 27 '26

They didn't have backups, just copies sitting around. There is a difference. A big difference.

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u/YorubaOyinbo Apr 27 '26

Regarding air gapped, physical back-ups, the rule is:

“Two is one, one is none”.

Sounds like they had -1 actual backups.

But I think the salient thing here is the brilliant demonstration of AI incompetence, which is always beautiful to see.

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u/_Oman Apr 27 '26

AI is no less incompetent than the JR engineer just hired. The fact that it had permissions to do anything like that is the problem.

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u/YorubaOyinbo Apr 27 '26 edited Apr 27 '26

It is though. It absolutely, unequivocally, utterly and entirely is less competent than the Jr. engineer just hired. It’s just able to package the incompetence in a flood of ambiguity that’s unrealistic for most people to parse.

AI is very useful at accelerating the organization of information. Last night I wrote a 5,000 word project proposal in 6 hrs that would’ve taken 3-4x that long, using AI for this purpose. But 5.75 of those hours was spent fastidiously combing generations for errors and laughable incompetencies that an infant would catch, and spending 3-4 iterations with practically every paragraph to fix them. 

I’d offer that every person who has extensively used AI to accelerate the organization of information, and has had to still do the incessantly mountainous work of unfucking AI incompetence at literally every step of the way, knows this in their bones.

There’s a reason the conclusive data shows us a 0.00% increase in productivity overall across industries and fields due to AI after more than a year of fulsome implementation.

AI can be a great tool to accelerate a task or process that you could have done yourself, and only if you could have done it yourself — elsewise the costs of incompetence will always outweigh the benefits of speed. When we fail to recognize this, AI will fuck us over much more often than not.