Yep, Prime Time AI: Real Life Is Not Marketing Blabber

May 5, 2026

Another dinobaby post. No AI unless it is an image. This dinobaby is not Grandma Moses, just Grandpa Arnold.

I was scanning outputs of my trusty news reader. I thought a tweet from X.com looked interesting. Plus, if it were useful and short, the combo would be a bonus for me. I clicked and my browser displayed: “An AI Agent Just Destroyed Our Production Data. It Confessed in Writing.” No short snappy message. This puppy was a 2,300 word howl. The main point of this tweet, in my opinion, AI cannot be trusted.

That’s been my perception, but this long tweet is painful and in many ways illustrative of the crazy “If we build it, they will come” approach to smart software. Over-promising, under delivering, marketing jibber jabber, weaponized use cases, and endless attempts to remake the human world in the image of some weird Silicon Valley zeitgeist.

The basic story is that a fellow runs a company for small businesses. Examples of the clients include car rental outfits, customer information, and payment tracking. The firm used the Anthropic Claude system for a number of functions. One of these is routine maintenance. To make a long story short, the fancy software packaged by another smart software surfer deleted the service firm’s production database. The backups allegedly were on the drive containing the production database. Bottomline: Data deleted. PocketOS was offline. Its customers out of luck.

Surprisingly, the author of the tweet was able to connect with an outfit called Railway. Here’s what the vendor said:

Within 10 minutes I had notified Railway’s CEO, Jake Cooper (@JustJake), and their head of solutions, Mahmoud (@thisismahmoud), publicly on X. Jake replied: “Oh my. That 1000% shouldn’t be possible. We have evals for this.” It is now 30+ hours since the deletion. Railway still cannot tell me whether infrastructure-level recovery is possible.

The most interesting segment in the tweet is the text of the output the smart software provided after nuking the customer database. I won’t reproduce it because the smart software used objectionable language and did a “Senator, thank you for that question” and did zero to remediate the problem. Smart, right?

The tweet mentions a number of vendors; for example, Anthropic’s latest and greatest version of Claude, an outfit named Railway, and a company called Cursor. Frankly I am not sure how these firm’s fit into the database deletion problem. The write up includes some smarmy lingo about how the smart software does not do bad thinks like take out a production database. Yeah, I believe everything I read on the Internet. I would wager the author of this long screed on X.com is going to be a bit more skeptical going forward.

It seems to me that each of the vendors acted in a way that was far from smart. How do I know? The production database was disappeared. That’s not supposed to happen unless the server is in a data center near Internet City in Dubai. The write up ends with a request for a “real” journalist to contact the owner of the business which had a digital bullet shot through his back end.

I am not a real journalist, so I won’t bother the fellow. I do have some general observations:

Regulations related to the commercial use of AI might be an idea worth considering
Assembling a business from diverse software components, wrappers, and plumbing becomes more dicey when smart software is added to the mix. My thought is to do the Tandem Computer thing: Total redundancy. I still operate in this inefficient, old-fashioned manner. It costs more, but when the shaft enters the buttock, I just punch my ConnectPro and use the hot backup machine. Then I get the arrow removed and go see the horrible legal professional whom I pay to protect me.
Keep the names of the companies who precipitated this business disaster in mind. You may want to avoid these folks like a dead rat in an Amtrak compartment.

Net net: Smart software fails. That’s in the DNA of the tensor approach the “frontier folks” rely upon. If you like surprises, you will love smart software.

Stephen E Arnold, May 2, 2026

Written by Stephen E. Arnold · Filed Under AI, Marketing, News

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Stephen E. Arnold monitors search, content processing, text mining and related topics from his high-tech nerve center in rural Kentucky. He tries to winnow the goose feathers from the giblets. He works with colleagues worldwide to make this Web log useful to those who want to go "beyond search". Contact him at sa [at] arnoldit.com. His Web site with additional information about search is arnoldit.com.