If you’re following the world of AI right now, no doubt you saw Jason Lemkin’s post on social media reporting how Replit’s AI deleted his production database, despite it being told not to touch anything at all due to a code freeze. After deleting his database, the AI even advised him that a rollback would be impossible and the data was gone forever. Luckily, he went against that advice, performed the rollback, and got his data back.
Then, a few days later I stumbled on another case, this time of the Gemini CLI agent deleting Anurag Gupta’s files. He was just playing around, kicking the tires, but the series of events that took place is illuminating.
These incidents show AI agents making mistakes, but they also show agents failing to recover. In both cases, the AI not only broke something, but it couldn't fix it. That’s why remediation needs to be a first-class concern in AI agent implementations.