Lee DunaClaude Code deletes developers' production setup, including its database and snapshots — 2.5 years of records were nuked in an instant
kamenYou either have a backup or will have a backup next time.
Something that is always online and can be wiped while you’re working on it (by yourself or with AI, doesn’t matter) shouldn’t count as backup.
AI or not, I feel like everybody has had “the incident” at some point. After that, you obsessively keep backups.
For me it was a my entire “Junior Project” in college, which was a music album. My windows install (Vista at that time - I know, vista was awful, but it was the only thing that would utilize all 8gb of my RAM because x64 XP wasn’t really a thing) bombed out, and I was like “no biggie, I keep my OS on one drive and all of my projects on the other, I’ll just reformat and reinstall Windows”
Well… I had two identical 250gb drives and formatted the wrong one.
Woof.
I bought an unformat tool that was able to recover mostly everything, but I lost all of my folder structure and file names. It was just like 000001.wav, 000002.wav etc. I was able to re-record and rebuild but man… Never made that mistake again. Like I said. I now obsessively backup. Stacks of drives, cloud storage. Drives in divverent locations etc.
AI or not, I feel like everybody has had “the incident” at some point. After that, you obsessively keep backups.
Yup!
Also totally unrelated helpful tip- triple check your inputs and outputs when using dd to clone a drive. dd works great to clone an old drive onto a new blank one. It is equally efficient at cloning a blank drive full of nothing but 0s over an old drive that has some 1s mixed in.
And that’s a great example where a GUI could be way better at showing you what’s what and preventing such errors.
If you’re automating stuff, sure, scripting is the way to go, but for one-off stuff like this seeing more than text and maybe throwing in a confirmation dialogue can’t hurt - and the tool might still be using dd underneath.
Quite true.
It’s an argument I often have with the CLI only people, and have been having for years. Like ‘with this Cisco router I can do all kinds of shit with this super powerful CLI’. Yeah okay how do I forward a port? Well that takes 5 different commands…
Or I just want to understand what options are available- a GUI does that far better than a CLI.
IMO it’s important to recognise that both are valid in different scenarios. If you want to click through and change something that’s actually doable with a couple of clicks, that’s fine. If you want to do this through the CLI, it’s also fine - if you’re someone who’s done 10 deployments today and configured the same thing, it would be muscle memory even if it’s 5 commands.
Quite true there is absolutely a place for both in all situations. And it’s why I hate absolutists who think gui’s are some sort of disease.
GUIs are discoverable and intuitive, You can lay out all the options for the user so they know what they can choose and make the right choice.
CLIs are powerful and scriptable, easy to automate.
Neither is bad.
Neither is bad.