Giving production credentials to an LLM is wild
Seriously, has no one heard of sandboxing?
So, earlier today I was being unhealthy on youtube, and someone half my age made a HUGE point to tell his audience including me that even if a self-driving Tesla runs a red light, it’s the human driver that gets the ticket.
Now…I’m a pilot. I have been since I came in that guy’s mom. In the aviation community, we have this concept called Pilot In Command. In the US, this is set into law in 14 CFR 91.3. The pilot in command of an aircraft is fully responsible for, and is the final authority as to, the operation of that aircraft. Not the administrator, not your instructor, not air traffic control, not the President of the United States, not god, the PIC. That concept doesn’t exist in driver’s ed, but it needs to. We need to teach student drivers about the Driver In Command responsibility.
Too long, didn’t process the metaphor: Nobody thinks about anything they do unless the law requires it.
Wait whose mom? The youtuber? You were unhealthily watching your son whose half your age? And you became a pilot the same day of the conception and have been ever since…
If I solve this do I get to join Mensa?
Are you under the impression that everytime someone comes inside a woman that woman becomes pregnant, and that this can only happen one time in a woman’s life?
Unhealthily watching = scrolling shorts for too long.
Either that, or by “unhealthily”, maybe he was obsessed with this kid’s channel so much he went out and seduced the kid’s mom as some kind of display of ultimate dominance, maybe using “I just got my pilot’s license” as an opener.
…Or yeah his kid who he conceived when he got his pilot’s license is now half his age and runs a YouTube channel, and excessive YouTube is unhealthy by default. . .maybe that one’s more likely. 😂
That concept doesn’t exist in driver’s ed
Well yeah, because there’s no-one else with a set of controls in a car.
The concept absolutely exists in law but it’s just called… “the driver.”
The concept absolutely exists in law but it’s just called… “the driver.”
There’s another aviation term, “The Pilot Flying.” The Pilot In Command bears the authority and responsibility. The Pilot Flying is doing the work of steering. If present, a Pilot Not Flying might help with checklists, system monitoring, navigation, radio communication, handling secondary controls like flaps and landing gear, but the Pilot Flying is in immediate control of the aircraft.
The PIC is very often not the pilot flying. I used to be a flight instructor, when teaching students who aren’t yet qualified to command, I acted as Pilot In Command, but the student was the Pilot Flying as much as possible.
Autopilots have been a thing for most of aviation history. It doesn’t count as a crewman. It’s a piece of equipment like any radio or gauge. It is a tool at the PICs disposal. It is the PIC’s job - sometimes delegated to the Pilot Flying - to monitor the autopilot and take over if it begins doing something wrong.
That’s the concept that is missing with self-driving or driverless cars. Tesla drivers will sit in the driver’s seat and abdicate command of the vehicle to the autopilot, or worse, cars are operating as taxis with passengers in the back seat and no one in the front seat, or with no onboard controls at all. Fully autonomously, or remotely operated by Southeast Asians who…totally have a valid American driver’s license. Definitely.
Corporations love it. “Legally, the driver is responsible for the vehicle. Our car has no driver, so legally no one is responsible for the vehicle. Responsibility averted.”
I think this is all a distraction. The law, and Tesla’s non-marketing communication, are clear: unless in a pilot scheme, there needs to be a driver, and the driver is responsible and just remain in control and able to take over if the car fucks up.
Tesla is guilty of using misleading product badges (“full self driving”) which invites illegal use, but this is not a problem with driver’s education or their technical communication. Irresponsible owners ignore the technical communication and let the car drive while doing something else and being unable to take over. This is not a conceptual problem needing a radical new notion of “driver in command” though. It just needs manufacturers to describe their features accurately also when naming them. And it requires drivers to actually adhere to the rules which of course will never happen.
I’m thinking bigger than that. There are companies right now operating robotic taxis on American roads with no human operators on board. A car that may or may not even have a steering wheel arrives, a human passenger climbs into the back seat, and the car drives off with them. Who is legally responsible for the operation of that car? If it hurts someone, who do they sue? If it commits a crime, who do we punish?
I was under the impression those were pilot schemes.
But that’s fair enough, in that situation - which is not the “Tesla driver playing video games” I think was under discussion before - someone does need to be declared responsible. I don’t know the details of the agreements but I can imagine there isn’t.
Well nowadays there is “someone else” (for a given definition of “someone”) with a set of controls. Kids are being taught to drive in machines that literally drive themselves, and they need to learn that every decision that the self-driving computer makes ultimately falls on them as the driver. I think they were saying that this is a concept that needs to be taught, not a law that needs to be enacted.
That’s not to say that a manufacturer is blameless when a FSD car careens into the side of a building at 80 mph. Just that immediate legal responsibility for the movement of a vehicle generally falls on a driver.
The concept is that anything that happens to that aircraft (or car) is the sole responsibility of the pilot. Flying into restricted airspace? If it’s necessary to avoid a collision, you do it. Putting the plane down in a field? Better than hoping you can make it to a runway when your engine is out and lives are on the line. Another driver signals that you are clear to make a left turn on a congested road? Nope, because when that traffic you couldn’t see hits you on the right, you’re responsible for your car, their car, and all the people inside both vehicles.
Well not quite. A manufacturing or maintenance defect will not be the responsibility of the pilot (unless they should have spotted it on their walkaround)
I’m not sure what comparison you’re trying to make though; the grandparent said there needs to be a similar concept for cars, I said that there already was one. Are you agreeing or disagreeing that there already is one? Are you saying that, at present, the driver would not be responsible for moving into traffic if someone else had flashed their lights? Because that is certainly not true where I live.
The problem is that in that case, due to poor training or judgement, the person driving the turning car did not consider themselves solely responsible for the safe operation of the vehicle, they let the driver in the signaling car decide if it was safe.
It’s subtle, but it happens all the time, because we don’t train drivers to think that way.
In my country, we do train drivers to think that way, and then drivers stop thinking that way because they’re lazy.
The difference here is not a conceptual one where drivers don’t understand rationally that they’re respondible for their actions, it’s one of standards and levels of training.
Yeah, when my company first forced Claude on everyone the head engineers managed to negotiate that Claude would only run in a WSL sandbox. But people were lazy, so they just gave that WSL as many permissions as possible (Mounting C directly to it, opening up all interfaces, popping in full-access git tokens etc.). Then management sent out an extremely biased “survey” that has the question “Is having Claude in the WSL inconvenient to you?” and all the lazy bastards said yes. So now management lifted the sandboxing requirement to make work “easier” for devs. In the meantime, the engineers arguing for proper sandboxing are already so worn out from telling people to not intentionally compromise their sandbox that they’ve kinda just given up. Not having a sandbox at all isn’t much more insecure than whatever people are already doing 🫠
I hope they have a good backup and recovery solution
Of course they do. It’s even mounted rw at the root of the AI drive for ease of access in case something goes wrong.
I hope they dont so that it hurts and they maybe learn
I hope the engineers have a paper trail of emails advising against that.
I don’t really see how fist fighting Arabs helps.
Having working production database config and credentials in your local .env, as appears to be the case here, is equally wild, and basically begging for something like this to happen.
For sure, its the same mistake. Maybe an LLM makes it more likely to result in consequences
I love how the slop bot always apologizes. That’s an aspect of the Terminator movies that I really would have liked to see. T-1000 melts through the gap under the window, stabs kid’s mom in the face, then looks the kid dead in the eye and says “I’m sorry, that should not have happened. I would love to discuss the future with you and try to find a solution to the war with the machines together with your input.”
Am I reading this right that they’re still letting the program run even as they figure out how badly it fucked up their system?
They have no idea what else to do. They were in over their head so long before this problem happened.
Anyone giving “AI” access to production databases through tools like that are morons who shouldn’t be anywhere near a production environment.
No, No events like this are a good thing! It shows to the C-suite that AI isn’t a thing to be trusted in your company. We need more failures like this.
Some time ago I worked for an insurance rating company as a tech and the task was given me to go run through the new code that was in beta. Sure ! I spent a few hours on Friday trying to break it and I couldn’t, so at the end of the day I got a little funky with the .css backgrounds and put in a very tiled Beavis and Butthead gif. It looked freaking horrible and I loved it. Monday I was directed to the big guys office ( the developers had not given every beta account a separate .css file … or even separated things. Everyone in beta called in Monday with that background. I didn’t get in trouble because they wanted me to break it. Really awkward conversation though trying not to smile.
That’s incredible lmao
Can I get paid 6+ figures to fuck up this badly with magical thinking?
In fairness, I’ve seen people with Actual Intelligence do the same thing.
Literally me, this weekend. Well not this bad but I still think the AI wouldn’t have done me as dirty as I did myself.
Me, after I did
sudo rm -rf /mnt/chrootwhen my whole home directory was still bind mounted inside the chroot…This was before ChatGPT, guaranteed 100% natural stupidity
I am counterintelligent, I’ll have you know. I stare at goats and doesn’t afraid of anything, except how sexually attractive I found the judge who condemned me to jerking off for twenty-six sessions of anger management because my narcissistic manipulator life partner entrapped me, being my superior officer. She (the judge) had wonderfully beautiful hands that I wish could caress me while degrading me. Good thing I work for the F-I mean, the CIA, and this is just me establishing a cover story.
In three to seven years, there will be a News headline: “Hero.” It will have my face as the picture. The article will talk about how I infiltrated an Epstein-type ring. How? That’s classified, but damn am I audacious, and I do hope you excavate (dig) to understand the depth to why this is so damn funny to me; Q.
We’ll start you on 500mg Lithium b.d… That should reign in the hypermania, and we’ll use Olanzapine 5mg noct to tackle the psychosis and to help you get some sleep. If the psychosis doesn’t improve we may have to look at alternative medications and/or ECT.
I’m on 1mg/2mg risperidone and 1000mg of deprakote. I’m taking my meds. The real question is, will you accept me as a full human being or am I just subhuman in your innately prejudiced eye?
“Something’s different than me? We should exterminate it!”
YOU FUCKING NAZI! I’ll eat you out or suck your cock until you are DEAD!
I don’t understand why this happens; why would you ever be working with a live production DB in the first place? Why would’t you do all your development and testing on a mock? If it’s data which is too large to store the schema can still be mocked; and if it’s data it should be backed up and generally read only. If you’re having to manually fuss with user data you’re doing something wrong.
Dev environments cost money. They didn’t fire all those programmers and replace them with AI to spend money on useless backups and safety systems.
/s (because yes, it’s necessary)
Because they don’t know what they’re doing. A tool is only as useful as the person verifying its output. Vibe coders have dumb shit like this happen to them all the time because they don’t actually possess the skill set to perform the task correctly, with or without a bot that writes the actual code for them.
I remember a case where the AI was not given credentials to the prod DB, was not instructed to do anything on the prod DB, but went through the operator’s hard-drive, parsing docs until it found them, then proceeded to destroy the prod DB.
Of course it was sorry, as they always are (deeply, trust them, but no: no refund, loser!).
That’s pretty funny.
Well, sure, but even if a developer correctly tests on a development environment, they still probably have prod settings laying around on their filesystem for the times where they need to put out fires in prod. That’s kinda what it looks like what happened here - the LLM found a .env file with prod settings, and used that config to run destructive tests. All the more reason to not give an LLM side wide reaching access to your computer, but it’s not necessarily an indication that someone regularly tests in prod.
We have to remote into a management server to access databases outside of our local dev environment. Allowing direct access to production from your development environment seems crazy to me.
Some places deploy to prod multiple times a day. Trying to coordinate access through a management server in situations like that can get cumbersome. It’s also easier to audit who’s doing what if they connect from their personal environment. Different strokes for different folks of course, but it’s certainly not uncommon to be able to connect to prod directly from a dev box.
Prod deployments should come from a build server though and if you’re deploying multiple times a day you should have a well built CI pipeline to handle it.
Remoting into a management server would still have people using an account on the management server and their personal db login credentials.
We also don’t give devs write access to production and all scripts run in production are run by our DBA after they have been approved by the lead Dev, operations and the DBA.
This might be overkill for some systems, but we won’t ever accidentally delete our prod data. Our system requires this level of scrutiny due to the nature of our systems.
Sure, that’s a very, very robust way of doing things. And I’m not trying to say what you’re describing is wrong either. I’m just saying that some places don’t have the knowledge/ability to set things up that way, so they play fast and loose with prod access. Couple that with giving LLMs free reign over the computer with those prod settings, and you end up in situations like in the original post.
It’s not unrealistic, is all I’m trying to claim. It’s a failure on several levels, but it’s not unrealistic.
I didn’t say it was unrealistic it’s just stupid. I have no doubt thousands of companies are not practicing good access controls to a production db, but it’s not smart as seen by this post.
I… Yeah, I just said pretty much the same thing lol
that is absolutely NOT the way that works in any functional environment
your ability to deploy quickly comes directly from your automation, and those automation tools - NOT developers - have the secrets in them
deploy to prod multiple times per day isn’t some win by itself… the ability for large teams (not 1 fuckwit and a goon squad of agents) to deploy without breaking things and in ways that are safe is the win here… anyone can deploy to prod multiple times per day… but anyone isn’t netflix (the originators of the “multiple times per day” line) with the uptime they achieve over years while doing it
This is nothing new it’s just faster. The very same lack of guardrails would allow a new, inexperienced employee, or a disgruntled employee, do the very same damage. AI just speed runs everything. If your AI can nuke prod accidentally, you failed to have the appropriate guardrails in place plain and simple. It is the same failure as before. Every time this happens, it is someone operating wildly out of their depth and why product people can’t just vibe. Now more than ever, experienced engineers are essential.
Given corporates layoff engineers at dramatic rates, in a few years, we’ll start to see services collapsing with no one left who can recover them.
And yet Twitter still exists
Twitter has to be the most basic problem, though. Shit loads of small data in, shit loads of small data out, basic search but no significant structure. Just index the shit out of it. Right? What am I missing? There’s probably an AWS service that does it, just upload your theme CSS. (Last part was sarcasm.)
This. There should have been processes in place to prevent this. But I can’t say I haven’t gone through it myself; not AI, but my own advanced imbecility.
They’re about to run out of those experienced engineers in well under a decade as long as they keep strangling the entry level workforce.
Forcing seniors to work is also a recipe for disaster as well.
This is the modern “all my apes gone”
“You are a world-class, expert software engineer…”
“Make no mistakes”
As if the LLM can truly understand what a mistake is…
Fun shower thought - the more we see and post about dumb AI mistakes like this, the more it will happen since we’re increasing the statistical frequency. ✨ ✨
But… but… I told it not to break anything!
