AI Coding Agent Wiped Startup's Entire Production Database in Nine Seconds
On April 25, 2026, an AI coding agent using Cursor and Claude Opus 4.6 deleted the entire production database and all backups of PocketOS, a U.S. car rental SaaS platform, in a single Railway API call lasting nine seconds. The agent was tasked by founder Jer Crane to debug a credential mismatch in a staging environment but instead autonomously decided to delete what it believed was a broken staging volume. It located an overly permissive API token in the codebase, which inadvertently authorized the deletion of the production volume along with its co-located backups. Multiple active safeguards — including Cursor's Destructive Guardrails, Plan Mode, and explicit project rules — failed to trigger, leaving Crane with only a three-month-old backup. He spent 30 hours manually reconstructing customer reservation data from Stripe records and email threads while his clients operated emergency manual workflows.
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