Comment by seer
1 day ago
Hmm that’s strange, in my experience it is the other way around - Claude is super diligent with infra and will _insist_ on double checking and trying everything for real before committing.
When I was doing this myself I would read the docs and just implement them - claud is going about doing real software archeology to figure if what is said is actually the truth or it’s stale/inaccurate/buggy.
I’ve become 10 times more diligent because it is a lot easier to do. It’s no longer Urgh it’s good enough let’s ship it, now it’s “sure put a leg on it to figure it out and double check it”.
Backups are _tested regularly_ now because LLMs make it cheap to do so.
The only problem is when new engineers who haven’t learned these things Pre-ai now don’t really get why it is needed in the first place and will often lead the agent astray.
I think to address this we need to change or improve our training routines in general for humans. I think a lot of companies nowadays just skip that and deploy a company wide skill/policy for the agents, but don’t transfer the underlying skills to the devs themselves.
> Backups are _tested regularly_ now because LLMs make it cheap to do so.
sighs heavily in 90's sysadmin
Testing backups is not just a question of whether or not the restore command works. Go back and read the Tao of Backup: http://www.taobackup.com/history.html . The application itself (in its current version, with its current features) needs to work with the backed-up data, and the only way to verify this is to attempt to actually work with the data.
If you don't trust your agent to ship to production without manually reviewing the output (in some way), you have no business trusting your agent managing your backups. The agent writing some tests doesn't mean that the tests adequately handle all of your actual scenarios, let alone that your system will adequately handle data that is missing since the last backup.
Good news: Eventually - and fairly regularly! - the agent will fuck up so badly you have to test the process!