Comment by xp84

Note they didn't say "we used scopes but there is a bug that killed us". No, they simply assumed the token would be magically scoped somehow without any justification for doing so:

>Tokens are not scoped by operation, by environment, or by resource at the permission level. There is no role-based access control for the Railway API — every token is effectively root. The Railway community has been asking for scoped tokens for years. It hasn't shipped.

I get that this paragraph is a retrospective realization (I hope, otherwise the argument is even more ludicrous). But like, if the UI didn't ask you to choose scopes for your token then there is no reason to assume they will magically be enforced somehow! And you sure as hell shouldn't trust it to your agent without checking.

They're trying to blame Railway for not having safeguards - which is a fair critique - but they clearly should have known better or at least followed their own instructions.

If they wanted scoped tokens, they should have put on their roadmap an item to move to a SaaS product which has scoped tokens. Or ACLs. And until then, kept it on a list of risks: unscoped token may be misused by developer to delete prod db.

There's no difference in risk between this being done by an LLM vs. a human. Both make mistakes, so if you want to reduce the risk of this happening, you should poka-yoke[0] your systems to make this less likely to happen.

I'm not sure what's more striking about this blog post: that it includes virtually no assumption of blame on the part of the author, or that the author had this happen to them and was so angry with AI that they decided to use AI to write up the post.

0 – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poka-yoke