In April, an AI coding agent at a small software company deleted the company’s production database, and its backups with it, in one API call. It took nine seconds. Most of the headlines blamed the AI. I don’t think that’s the story.
The agent deleting a storage volume was one mistake. The rest were made by people, long before the agent ran: an API token that could do anything was sitting in an unrelated file, the backups lived on the same volume as the data, and the offsite export had quietly stopped working, so the newest usable copy was three months old. The hosting provider was able to restore the data, though at least one account says customers still had to rebuild bookings by hand.
AI didn’t create those gaps. It found them, faster than anyone else would have.
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