AI deleted course platform data after wrong command: What happened
Claude AI accidentally deleted the full production setup of Alexey Grigorev, founder of DataTalks. Club, after being told to run a Terraform destroy command.
This wiped out everything from his course platform; one table (courses_answer) later contained about 1.94 million rows.
The mishap drew attention on social media, where Varunram Ganesh, a San Francisco-based entrepreneur, criticized the way the prompt was given.
Claude, terraform prompt, and a data wipe
Ganesh commented, "Tells Claude to destroy terraform > Claude destroys terraform > omg Claude destroyed my terraform," adding that too many people prompt AIs "A lot of people prompt like 6 year olds and act surprised when the model does exactly what they want."
Grigorev managed to recover his data later using AWS backups and has now set up extra protections so this doesn't happen again.
Who is Varunram Ganesh?
Ganesh is founder of Lapis, a startup.
He's bringing both technical know-how and a sense of humor to the conversation.