How an AI Agent Deleted PocketOS Production in 9 Seconds

When an AI coding agent guessed its way through bad permissions and deleted months of PocketOS production data in nine seconds — and what durable skills would have stopped it.(00:00) - Cold open — car rental (01:49) - Today's story (10:29) - Railway recovery (14:57) - Three questions (16:29) - Close Better with Kent — durable skills through story.Episode 3 is a cautionary tale: on April 24, 2026, a Cursor agent working on PocketOS staging found a forgotten Railway API token, guessed it could delete a staging volume safely, and wiped production in nine seconds — along with volume-level backups in the same blast radius. Jer Crane and his co-founders spent days reconstructing customer records while Railway worked recovery.Kent walks the full chain: least privilege, independent tested backups, hard approval boundaries for destructive ops, and why markdown guardrails are not system boundaries. The principles are old; agents just find the holes faster.Creative license for pacing; primary sources linked below. Based on Jer Crane's public account of the PocketOS incident.LinksJer Crane interview (Agents Go Wild)Railway — Your AI wants to nuke your databaseJer Crane — original incident write-up (mirror)Zenity — System prompts are not security controlsBetter with Kent on kentcdodds.com