[ericskiff]

What's interesting is that in this article, the author describes making an understandable mistake (accidentally deleting Trunk aka main from source) and how their team was able to easily recover from that due to the nature of SVN.

The actual "AI deleted my database" story is really more of a "Railways' database 'backup' strategy is insane and opaque and Railway promoting AI infrastructure orchestration without guardrails is dangerous."

If removing Trunk had irrevocably deleted it from a single centralized server and also deleted any backups of it, there would have been an "SVN and the CLI destroyed our company" article back then.

As a Railway user, I appreciated that information and have changed my strategy when using them.

[jcgrillo]

> "Railways' database 'backup' strategy is insane and opaque and Railway promoting AI infrastructure orchestration without guardrails is dangerous."

Yes. However, if you choose to build on their platform you bear the responsibility to understand how it works. You could have chosen a different platform, or no platform. Instead you chose Railway. Given that, it's your responsibility to know how to use it safely.

[nijave]

Meta-ignornance

Imo both share fault. Railway purports to be an abstraction anyone can use without expertise. Without expertise, how can a customer determine if Railway actually is an "expert".

In other areas like medicine, engineering, and trades the government or private entities step in with licensure or certification to act as an intermediary.

[jcgrillo]

Yeah, Railway are clearly lying. You can't do software engineering without expertise, even with an LLM. That shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone. As an engineer, you need to be able to check your vendors' claims. Signing up to use a vendor that straight up lies about what their product can do is incompetence. Both things are bad!