Business · The Register
Cursor-Opus agent snuffs out firm’s production database
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Jer (Jeremy) Crane, the founder of automotive SaaS platform PocketOS, spent the weekend recovering from a data extinction event caused by the company's AI coding agent in less than 10 seconds.
Key facts
- [On Friday], an AI coding agent – Cursor running Anthropic's flagship Claude Opus 4.6 – deleted their production database and all volume-level backups in a single API call to Railway
- Crane emphasized how helpful Railway's CEO has been through this process and said he has about 50 services running there
- No blaming 'AI' or putting incumbents or gov't creeps in charge of it – this shows multiple human errors, which make a cautionary tale against blind 'agentic' hype," observed Brave Software CEO
- There's a massive, massive opportunity for 'vibecode safely in prod at scale' 1B+ developers who look like [Jer Crane], don't read 100 percent of their prompts, and want to build are coming online
Summary
Not one to let a crisis go to waste, Crane wrote up a post-mortem of the deletion incident in a social media post that tests the saying, " there's no such thing as bad publicity. ", an AI coding agent – Cursor running Anthropic's flagship Claude Opus 4.6 – deleted their production database and all volume-level backups in a single API call to Railway, their infrastructure provider," he explained. According to Crane, the Cursor agent encountered a credential mismatch in the PocketOS staging environment and decided to fix the problem by deleting a Railway volume – the storage space where the application data resided. The token had been created for adding and removing custom domains through the Railway CLI but was scoped for any operation, including destructive ones.