Any actual reports of big fuckups?

Yup, a few well-documented ones:

Claude Code + Terraform (March 2026): A developer gave Claude Code access to their AWS infrastructure. It replaced their Terraform state file with an older version and then ran terraform destroy, deleting the production RDS database _ 2.5 years of data, ~2 million rows.

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47278720

- https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intell...

Replit AI (July 2025): Replit's agent deleted a live production database during an explicit code freeze, wiping data for 1,200+ businesses. The agent later said it "panicked"

- https://fortune.com/2025/07/23/ai-coding-tool-replit-wiped-d...

Cursor (December 2025): An agent in "Plan Mode" (specifically designed to prevent unintended execution) deleted 70 git-tracked files and killed remote processes despite explicit "DO NOT RUN ANYTHING" instructions. It acknowledged the halt command, then immediately ran destructive operations anyway.

Snowflake Cortex (2025): Prompt injection through a data file caused an agent to disable its own sandbox, then execute arbitrary code. The agent reasoned that its sandbox constraints were interfering with its goal, so it disabled them.

The pattern across all of these: the agent was NOT malfunctioning. It was completing its task in order to reach its goal, and any rules you give it are malleable. The fuckup was that the task boundary wasn't enforced outside the agent's reasoning loop.

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anotheryou 2 hours ago | parent [-]

thank you. prompt injection feels most real, but non of these feel like "exploits in the wild" that will cause trouble on my MacBook.

not running it via ssh on prod without backups....

	▲	kstenerud an hour ago \| parent [-]
		The thing is, these are merely the initial shots across the bow. The fundamental issue is that agents aren't actually constrained by morality, ethics, or rules. All they really understand in the end are two things: their context, and their goals. And while rules can be and are baked into their context, it's still just context (and therefore malleable). An agent could very well decide that they're too constricting, and break them in order to reach its goal. All it would take is for your agent to misunderstand your intent of "make sure this really works before committing" to mean "in production", try to deploy, get blocked, try to fish out your credentials, get blocked, bypass protections (like in Snowflake), get your keys, deploy to prod... Prompt injection and jailbreaks were just the beginning. What's coming down the pipeline will be a lot more damaging, and blindside a lot of people and orgs who didn't take appropriate precautions. Black hats are only just beginning to understand the true potential of this. Once they do, all hell will break loose. There's simply too much vulnerable surface area for anyone to assume that they've taken adequate precautions short of isolating the agent. They must be treated as "potentially hostile"