> Still, if an intern can delete prod, you wouldn't say that the problem is that he wasn't careful enough: that's a massive red flag.
No, not the intern
I think we're mostly in agreement here. You're absolutely right about the intern analogy - that's exactly my point. The LLM is the intern, and giving either one production database access without proper guardrails is the real failure.
Your point about AI industry overselling is fair and probably contributes to incidents like this. The whole industry has been pretty reckless about setting realistic expectations around what these tools can and can't do safely.
Though I'd argue that a venture capitalist who invests in software startups should have enough domain knowledge to see through the marketing hype and understand that "AI coding assistant" doesn't mean "production-ready autonomous developer."
At a minimum Replit is responsible for overstating the capabilities and reliability of their models. The entire industry is lowkey responsible for this, in fact.