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

Описание и применение

Автономный агент компании случайно удалил собственный список задач, уничтожив все активные задания. Причина – отсутствие изоляции тестов и наследование переменных окружения дочерними процессами. Были внедрены исправления: изоляция тестов, оповещение и авто‑восстановление списка задач, ограничения на разрушительные действия.

Задача

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

Результат

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.

Рабочий процесс

• 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

Доказательства

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.

Источник

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.

Источник

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

Источник