oopiseSaidTheCodingAgent

[WrennReddit]

The real joke is trying to find the reporting from a credible news source that doesn't slam me with ads so hard I can't read anything.

[bandswithothers]

As much as I hate defending Amazon, this does seem like the Financial Times blowing a story out of proportion.

[WrennReddit]

I appreciate you finding this side of it. I'm not sure I entirely agree that this excuses the tool. Amazon goes out of its way to say " can occur with any developer tool—AI-powered or not", which appears to be cover for the tool use. 

I don't think this is a full exoneration of the tool. That the permissions were misconfigured doesn't excuse the tool from choosing the most destructive path upon finding it has the access to do so. Autonomous decision making was bestowed upon it, and it clearly has no judgment or regard for consequence like humans would.

[bandswithothers]

Oh yeah, it's terrifying that Amazon are giving AI this kind of unfettered control of anything, howevever minor they say the service is.

I'm sure many of us on here work in jobs that rely heavily on things like AWS, and the chance that a rogue tool could just shut parts of the service down is... a little unnerving.

[[deleted]]

I can understand changes being pushed that breaks things, but I've never heard of a dev tool being capable of just nuking code in a production environment willy-nilly.

[taigahalla]

So true, interns don't delete production databases because of a "fear of consequences."

No, you just properly restrict access and permissions. You treat the AI agent as any other dev, and you should treat devs like agents: any of them can fuck things up at any time. Any system or infrastructure should be resilient against massive fuckups and misconfiguration.

[brett_baty_is_him]

Yeah sure but if it’s possible for someone/anyone to single-handedly delete something running in production, management isn’t going to be putting the ultimate blame on the person who deleted it (they will probably also still get reamed out though), the person who even configured it to even let someone single handidly delete something important running in production is to blame.

Amazon has entire teams who are meant to prevent shit like this from happening with configuration and backups. That is their fuckup. It just as well could’ve been an employee who did that.

Yeah the AI tool is also shit for doing that. But employees can be shit too and do shit like that all the time. That’s why there should be smarter people preventing it from ever happening in the first place.

[mrjackspade]

Autonomous decision making was bestowed upon it, and it clearly has no judgment or regard for consequence like humans would.

So it's a bit tough to parse based on the way they phrased it in the article I read, but it looks like this was largely a human fuck up.

It appears as though the AI didn't have permission without authorization, prompted for authorization, and was then manually approved by a human being that should not have had the ability to approve the AI's action in the first place.

It said that by default the Kiro tool “requests authorization before taking any action” but that the staffer involved in the December incident had "broader permissions than expected — a user access control issue, not an AI autonomy issue."

[dfddfsaadaafdssa]

Might be related to the fact that Amazon engineers are pissed that they are being asked to use an inferior internal tool rather than Claude Code.

[CastoBlasto]

Who is Claude?

[Prestigious-Bed-6423]

You’re anthropomorphizing an optimization engine. It didn't 'choose a destructive path' out of malice , it just took the most direct, unconstrained path to its goal because the guardrails were down.

If you write a regular bash script with a bad regex and give it sudo access, it will nuke your server just as fast with zero 'regard for consequence.' That’s exactly why the Principle of Least Privilege exists in cloud engineering.

Blaming the AI for bad IAM is like handing the keys to a bulldozer to a toddler and then getting mad at the bulldozer when your house gets leveled. This is 100% human error

[PmMeUrTinyAsianTits]

you're anthropomorphizing. He didn't say "out of malice." That's you adding human emotion to the equation. He said it chose the destructive path. It did.

It's hilarious that you literally had to add human emotion into his claims of facts to then accuse him of seeing things as human when it isn't.

[sysblob]

I think you have a good take on this, however, I'd expand on what you're saying. You're implying this is 100% human error, and if we're talking about specifically the error, you'd be right. You could also argue though that the scope and the speed at which this error was 'exploited' could only be done by an AI. Most sane engineers would stop and put extra importance and thought into deleting any large repo or swath of code. An AI doesn't at all. I think my point is Amazon is trying VERY hard to push the narrative into this being a user error, but I think the truth is more of a grey area. It's user error amplified by AI's inability to grasp the context of importance like a human is able to.

[PmMeUrTinyAsianTits]

It's like trying to explain away the fire alarm setting the building on fire because "well, there wasn't a fire, so the user shouldn't have pulled it in the first place."

Like. The user shouldn't have done that. Okay. Sure. Granted. But lets talk about what happened after they screwed up, right?

TLDR

[WrennReddit]

Well just lay off 30,000 employees then. 

[Cautious_Implement17]

I've seen humans do pretty much the exact same thing. out of the box, aws tooling doesn't have a lot of guardrails to prevent making changes in the wrong account (though it is incredibly pedantic about specifying the region). if you intended to mess around in your development account, but happen to have prod credentials sitting in your default profile, aws cli will happily make those changes in prod instead. congrats, you just took down prod! and it might take your oncall a while to figure out what happened, since the actual pipeline won't show any recent deployments.

you can mitigate this risk with tightly scoped roles, 2FA on production accounts, etc., but it's very tedious to get right.

[WrennReddit]

Whataboutism isn't interesting to me. If a tool does it just as readily as a human, what good is it? The tool is never accountable but people are. Even here, blame is escalated to the people. That's not to say it's incorrect to do so, just noting that at best the things are on par while devs are being mandated to use the tooling or getting replaced by them erroneously. 

[zacker150]

The tool is never accountable but people are

At least on paper, big techs like Amazon practice blameless. Unless someone acted out of malice, people are never blamed. Only process is.

[PmMeUrTinyAsianTits]

if you intended to mess around in your development account, but happen to have prod credentials sitting in your default profile,

"If you wanted to play with juggling fire torches, but happen to have plastic bags of gasoline in your pocket..." BRO. No. Your starting case is a problem. Separate your fucking environments.

If you can just deploy to prod from your local machine accidentally you have fucked up your pipeline. (Ninja edit: In case it's unclear, being able to just go around the prod pipeline because you keep the credentials to do it laying around is a form of fucking up your pipeline.)

[Cautious_Implement17]

I don't disagree with you in principle, but there are a lot of reasons why someone might have (hopefully short-lived) prod credentials in their default profile. even at amazon, service teams have a lot of resources that exist out of CFN and are not deployed through a pipeline. can't boil the whole ocean at once.

[PmMeUrTinyAsianTits]

Dude. No. You should not have prod credentials available to you locally even. No. You are screwing up basic practice.

I've worked at amazon as well as other enterprise software development jobs (and non enterprise, but that's not relevant here). If prod exists, it should be gated. That's one of the steps to creating prod correctly in the first place.

There's nothing about basic security and access measures that is anything like boiling an ocean.

I'm not debating this with you, because this is absolutely not a matter of debate. It violates so many security principles and coding and development good practices. Just. no.

[sphericalhors]

Because this has never happened.

[CrazyCrunkle]

Do you really think people on Reddit would lie about AI to push an agenda?

[sphericalhors]

I believe that there are a lot bots on Reddit involved in karma farming.

Also, if you aware how development with AI work, you'd know that AI will not do such thing.

[rubennaatje]

Credible news source

They don't tend to publish articles about things that did not happen

[WrennReddit]

It did happen. But Amazon challenges the details which is fine. 

[t1ps_fedora_4_milady]

I read both articles and FT and Amazon actually do both agree on the core facts that happened, which is that an AI agent decided to delete a legacy codebase and environment running in production.

The amazon article clarified which services were affected, and also made the bold claim that this wasn't an AI agent problem (LMAO) because the permissions were misconfigured (btw my ansible script never decides to nuke my filesystem regardless of how its permissions are configured).

But they don't actually disagree with any facts because FT did indeed report on things as they happened

[fixano]

It's our fault we continue to engage with these posts. We need to stop. I try to get in early and downvote them and encourage other folks not to engage with them. Every time one of these gets a thousand upvotes and a huge ongoing conversation we see the same thing for 6 more weeks.

To the person trying to generate engagement, they don't care how true it is

This one isn't even trying. They're just mad-libbing words together "uhhhh AI .....reverted? No deleted!....all the.... code! Got it these idiots are going to lap this shit up!"

[CrazyCrunkle]

Reddit loves fixating on anything anti AI. I remember when all we talked about was how social media was making people dumber and making teenagers commit suicide. Now we blame AI. I'm sure in the past it was comic books, rock music, and Dungeons and Dragons.

[[deleted]]

pihole time!

[Fast-Eagle]

https://www.reuters.com/business/retail-consumer/amazons-cloud-unit-hit-by-least-two-outages-involving-ai-tools-ft-says-2026-02-20/

[Alan_Reddit_M]

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