AI, Databases, and Learning to Ride

Picture someone learning to ride a bicycle. They push off, wobble, gather a bit of speed, feel the lurch of imbalance — and down they go. Palms scraped, knee bleeding, a little bewildered on the footpath. Then they get back on.

This is, more or less, the story of how anything new gets adopted. It’s a deeply human thing, the stubborn conviction that life can be better, that if we just go for it, things will improve. And so we advance in fits and starts — the Gilded Age and the Age of Reform, boom and bust, build and repair, fall and get up. Progress doesn’t really move in a straight line. It wobbles.

The recent story of an AI agent deleting a company’s entire database is one of those falls. The CEO published an account about thirty hours after the incident, and the details matter. The AI had been handed a credential with full power over the company’s database — not just reading and writing records, but deleting storage volumes outright. And deleting a volume also wiped every backup attached to it. There was no independent backup anywhere else.

“AI deleted it” makes for a compelling headline. The truer version is that someone gave a powerful new tool unrestricted reach, and the tool used it. That isn’t really an AI story; it’s a human one. We see something powerful, we lean into it, we fall over. We learn. Sometimes the bruises are small. Sometimes you lose an entire database.

The lessons aren’t novel. Constrain the blast radius. Keep backups in places your agent cannot touch. Give the powerful little friend only as much rope as it needs. Wear a helmet, if you’re inclined that way — though plenty of the best riders learn precisely by going without one, falling, and getting up again.

The deeper point is that this is how progress actually feels from the inside. Not a smooth incline upward, but a wobble, a lurch, a scrape, and then — back on the bike, pedalling a little more carefully than before. Losing all your data is, if nothing else, highly educational.

CEO’s original report: x.com/lifeof_jer/status/2048103471019434248