[8note]

they're doing as well as professionals do without oversight on production environments. There's no lack of stories about people deleting their production environments with data loss too.

the fix has always been to limit what can be done directly to prod, and put it through both review, and tests before a change can touch production.

[prymitive]

> they're doing as well as professionals do without oversight on production environments

The difference is that if a human does it there usually is done accountability, you’ll be asked how it happened and expected to learn from it. And if you do it again your social score goes down, nobody will trust you and you’ll be consider a liability. If a cli tool does it the outcome is different, you might stop saying the tool or you might blame yourself for not giving the tool enough context. And if it does it again you might just shrug it off with “well of course, it’s just a tool”.

[true_religion]

Accountability according to reputation is exactly what is happening for AI providers. All these articles about Claude destroying systems makes people trust Claude less, and maybe even “fire” Claude by choosing another AI provider with better safeguards or low privileges built in.

[scuff3d]

So you're saying they need oversight... from a professional. Preferably someone with years of experience and domain expertise, who knows how to not fuck everything up?

[dmix]

Almost every software engineer seems to agree on that point. Not believing marketing hype is standard practice in this industry because plenty of us are inherently techno-optimists who have been burned by over-belief in the past.

Regardless it is hard to dismiss the fact AI is making it easier for randoms to develop software. And it will keep getting better the more integrated and controlled it gets.

[scuff3d]

If Hackernews is to be taken as a representative crosss section of the industry, I disagree. I've seen plenty of people on here so hyped it boarders on hysteria. I work with a couple of senior devs who have gotten downright weird about it.

Maybe HN leans more toward the hobbiest and student side then it does industry professionals, I don't know, but you don't have to look far to find someone who swears up and down you can run a couple agents in a loop and have it build multi million line code bases with little to no oversight.

[bigstrat2003]

> they're doing as well as professionals do without oversight on production environments.

That's nonsense. First, most people haven't deleted the production environment by accident. They have enough sense to recognize that as a dangerous thing and will pause to think about it. Second, the ones who do make that mistake learn and won't make it again, which is not something the clanker is capable of.

[SpicyLemonZest]

The article says that Claude did recognize the danger, and advised the developer to run a safer setup with no risk of the two websites stomping on each other's resources, but he overrode it. I've definitely seen situations in my career where a junior developer does something dangerous and destructive after a senior dev overrode guardrails meant to prevent it. (None quite this bad, but then again I've never worked on small sites.)