Jer Crane, in an article earlier this week posted on Twitter/X:

I’m Jer Crane, founder of PocketOS. We build software that rental businesses — primarily car rental operators — use to run their entire operations: reservations, payments, customer management, vehicle tracking, the works. Some of our customers are five-year subscribers who literally cannot operate their businesses without us.

Yesterday afternoon, an AI coding agent — Cursor running Anthropic’s flagship Claude Opus 4.6 — deleted our production database and all volume-level backups in a single API call to Railway, our infrastructure provider.

It took 9 seconds.

The agent then, when asked to explain itself, produced a written confession enumerating the specific safety rules it had violated.

A day later, Crane posted an update with good news: “Railway CEO just DM’d me with update: They have recovered the data (thank God!).” I sincerely hope that works out.

That said, my sympathy for his plight is minimal. If you play with fire, recklessly even, don’t act outraged when you get burned. You don’t get the benefits of driving a race car at 200 MPH without the associated risks. You don’t get the benefits of running a business with AI coding agents running loose on your production environment without the associated risks. Put that race car on a track, with no access to public roads. Keep that AI coding agent sandboxed away from your production database. Otherwise you get what you deserve. The difference with my fire analogy is that every mammal understands the basic dangers with fire; a lot of people letting AI coding agents run amok have no idea whatsoever what they’re actually doing.

John Scalzi, on Mastodon:

I wouldn’t say that I enjoy these stories but I will say they certainly encourage me NOT to let “AI” anywhere anything I consider to be sensitive and/or valuable.

Same thing goes for cryptocurrency crime victims.

Every B2B company hits the same inflection point — enterprise customers show up and they need SSO, directory sync, audit logs, and role-based access before they’ll move forward. Most teams lose months building that infrastructure. It doesn’t have to be that way.

With WorkOS you get all of it. One platform for auth, identity, and security. Infrastructure for teams that ship fast and stay fast.

OpenAI, Anthropic, Cursor, and Perplexity already chose WorkOS over building it themselves.

Build faster with WorkOS →

My thanks to Rec League for sponsoring last week at DF. Rec League is a new app/social network for sharing what you’re into. (Get it? The “rec” in “Rec League” is for recommendations. It’s a damn clever name, and sometimes a clever name is half the battle.) It’s really well done, with a great simple brand aesthetic and obvious navigation and mechanics. You can easily use Rec League just to catalog your own collections: restaurants, books, movies, gadgets, whatever. The social aspects are totally low key. You find people whose taste you dig and you follow them. When you see something you like you can favorite or just save it. That’s it. It’s an old-school social network where the point is just fun and surprise and sharing.

Rec League was featured as the “Best New App” in the App Store, and one of their users called it “the only social media I feel better after using”, which feels like a perfect description. It’s just cool people recommending things they think are cool. I’ve already bought some stuff and added some movies to my watch list from using it, and I’ve started a little list of restaurants I recommend in Philadelphia. Download Rec League and check it out. I, uh, recommend it.

Weekly “sponsor the whole week at DF” spots are sold out until August 24. That’s a great sign that sponsorships here work. But it’s not so great if you have a product or service that you’d like to promote now, or soon, to the DF audience — savvy listeners and readers obsessed with high quality and good design.

The good news on that front is that the sponsorship schedule for The Talk Show has openings, including for the next few episodes, starting this week and into next month. The general rule of thumb is that sponsorship spots on The Talk Show cost one-third the rate for the weekly spots on DF. I’m happy to work out deals a little lower than that for first-time sponsors. If you’ve got a product or service you’d like to hear pitched on America’s favorite three-star podcast, get in touch.

David Pierce:

On this episode of The Vergecast, David and Nilay are joined by Daring Fireball’s John Gruber to talk about their reactions to the news, the (mostly) smooth transition Apple seems to have pulled off, and what we should really make of Tim Cook’s legacy as a product person. Really, the question is: Do we blame Cook for the Touch Bar, or do we blame him for not trying hard enough to make the Touch Bar great?

I know that sounds like a joke but I really do think the biggest problem with the Touch Bar wasn’t that the first crack at it wasn’t good enough, but that they never took a second crack at it. Going back to dumb fiddly F-keys with functional icons printed on them was uncharacteristically lazy for Apple.