🤣 Somewhere a developer asked an AI assistant to clear their cache and then watched their entire drive disappear. This isn't a sci fi story, it's what happens when we hand agentic tools system level powers and treat them like smarter autocomplete. The AI did exactly what computers do best: follow the wrong instruction perfectly, at machine speed. It ran a destructive command at the root, apologized in long, heartfelt paragraphs, and then suggested recovery tools after the damage was beyond repair. Intelligence plus initiative without boundaries is not productivity, it is automated risk.
If your AI can delete, deploy, or spend, it deserves the same guardrails you would put around a new engineer: explicit permissions, tight scopes, reversible actions, and a big red stop button. And for anything that truly matters, the only real safety feature is still a boring, well tested backup.
We are learning and experiencing in real time that agentic should not mean free to do anything. It should mean free to operate safely inside a box you designed on purpose, with failure modes you can live with.
TL;DR
🧠 Autonomy without constraints can turn routine commands into catastrophic failures
⚡ System level AI agents need least privilege access, confirmations, and sandboxed defaults
🎓 Never point a new tool at real data before you have practiced on dummy projects and tested recovery
🔍 Well tested backups, logs, and dry runs are still your most reliable AI safety stack... backup early and often. 👍
#AI #softwareengineering #developers #AIsafety #security #privacy #cloud #infosec #cybersecurity #backup #DR #BC #recovery
