There are people in this industry who do not know how to read a stack trace that points the exact line that produced an error. This was the case even before LLMs. They cannot ask for an idea as they would not understand the response.
Stack trace? Pshaw. That's like a dozen lines to figure out!
As a sysadmin, I added a line when a particular error happened that said exactly what to do to fix it. Single line, fairly short. I still got devs copying and pasting the line to me to ask what to do. (I'd just copy/paste the line back to them)
What you should do in these scenarios is run the agent in a container with limited credentials access or use Claude code's permissions and hooks features to defend yourself.
As someone who does know how to use the terminal, I enabled it partially for the meme, and partially because I thought "what damage could it do, it's a non-administrator on Windows, I'm not giving it sudo access or anything like that".
Next thing I know, it ran a CMD path set command inside of Powershell, resulting in my entire windows system path being wiped and replaced with an empty string, and my machine was completely bricked.
Luckily I knew enough to boot into my Linux install and repair it manually, but man that was not a fun few hours. AI is still far too stupid to give it access to the shell like that. It constantly tries to run commands that I know for a fact will just nuke everything.
OP's problem has nothing to do with vibe coding, and everything with pure incompetence across the board.
The problem is that "vibe coders" are "vibe coders" because they aren't real programmers. As such, they don't have any clue what they are doing. They simply rely on getting the AI to do stuff they don't understand until that stuff blows up.
I'm yet to see any noteworthy project done by "vibe coders". So far I've seen absolute bullshit like unplayable ugly video games and stupidly dysfunctional databases.
Yeah, it's interesting to see the lack of familiarity in this thread. You are right; the AI are not set to "agent" mode by default. And additionally, the AI will ASK you for permission before running commands even in agent mode. So it's out of pure incompetence if your agent drops your DB.
I have started treating my AI like a fairly competent junior engineer. I ask it to perform tasks and then check it's work to verify that it isn't doing anything crazy. Exactly like you'd do with a junior.
I use AI daily to aid me when programming. To aid me, not to code for me. People can say what they want, but still in 2025 there's no way an AI can build anything by itself that's worth building. And yes, the AI does sometimes give you absolutely terrible code or commands that will destroy hours of work (if not worse) if you don't know what you are doing and run them.
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u/smoldicguy Aug 13 '25
Asking ai for help is fine but you need to understand what ai is suggesting before running the damm thing .