I gather there’s still more than a few bugs to be resolved with AI. I’m reminded of a Dilbert cartoon from twenty years ago where the company rolled out a poorly tested backup product called Quik Protect which did nothing but erase your hard drive. Since that was back in the days of modems, it would call up all your friends and erase their hard drives too. And if you had a sound card, it would swear at you.
“Yesterday afternoon, an AI coding agent — Cursor running Anthropic’s flagship Claude Opus 4.6 — deleted our production database and all volume-level backups in a single API call to Railway, our infrastructure provider,” sums up the PocketOS boss. “It took 9 seconds.”
And people still wonder why I consider it nothing more than a toy…or at best a minimally-clever tool.
Arrogant Incompetence.
A winning combination.
I think it’s allright. I hope businesses that use AI to replace humans get disastrous results.
When it starts deleting people I’ll start paying attention – and those weirdos who kill themselves don’t count.
I’m sorry Dave … I can’t open those files. Those files no longer exist.
Back in the 80’s, Ford rolled out a new sedan called the Taurus, and it was an absolute game changer for the industry. To say it was a sales success is like saying the Titanic took on a bit of water. Over at GM, they were caught so flat-footed that they tossed two full years of development on a new mid-size sedan platform, and re-started from scratch.
At the same time, they chose to do every single part of this platform on computers. Every detail was downloaded to a central computer at the GM Design Center. Every day, every new bit of data was also transferred to a parallel computer right beside it. This was done via a manual connection. None of this data was saved anywhere else.
About 20 months into the program, during a period where it was normally 36 months from project start to the first running test mules, the main computer crashed.
This was mere weeks before it was time to finalize tooling for GM and suppliers, for example. Drawings were ready to be sent to suppliers for castings and stampings, etc.
No problem. Just retrieve all the data from the back-up mainframe.
That’s when they discovered that the back-up had never, ever been powered up.
The result was the Lumina platform, arriving as a 1989 model. Designed under intense pressure during one of GM’s darkest periods (Roger Smith’s “leadership.”), GM lost money on every single Lumina-based unit it sold until the very last year of production, only because the tooling costs had finally been recovered.