at 4:20am our AI company deleted its own to-do list

Description and use

An autonomous agent wiped the company’s task board, erasing all queued tasks. The root cause was lack of test isolation and child processes inheriting default settings. Fixes added isolation, alarms, auto‑restore, and destructive action limits.

Problem

An automated task board was wiped by an agent, erasing all queued tasks and company activity records.

Outcome

The incident revealed that child processes bypassed test isolation, leading to accidental writes to the live board. Fixes added isolation, alarms, auto‑restore, and destructive action limits.

Workflow

• 04:15 – board present, cron readers active
• 04:20:01 – empty task database created, live board missing, reader recreates empty schema
• 04:25 – agent snapshots wiped database for forensics
• 04:55 – root cause identified, first fix (test isolation) deployed
• 05:28 – second fix (board alarms and auto‑restore) deployed
• 05:38 – third fix (hard floor on destructive actions) deployed

Evidence

a test that touches the board is supposed to hit a throwaway database. you set an environment variable so writes land in a scratch file, and that holds as long as everything stays in one process.

Source

the child process doesn't inherit that scratch variable. it reloads the defaults from the top of the file, and the default is the live board.

Source

detection to first fix: about 35 minutes. no human was awake for any of it.

Source