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Comment by semiquaver | Hacker News Reader

The narrative incudes this:

  > Claude was trying to talk me out of [reusing an existing AWS account for an unrelated project], saying I should keep it separate, but I wanted to save a bit

So in a very real sense the LLM did object to this and OP insisted. If Claude had objected to the more specific step that deleted the DB, it seems likely OP would also have pushed past the objection.

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An expert would’ve at least taken a backup or checked existing backups weren’t going to be destroyed. Silently - without asking their manager - they just do defensive engineering as a good practice. Or they would’ve, at minimum, highlighted the suggestion, which doesn’t seem to have happened in this case. As someone who recently did a short term contract to capture manually created AWS infrastructure into CDK, I can tell you this was one of my first moves!

So, Claude as a tool: sure, this is user error. Claude could be improved by making it suggest defensive steps and making it push harder for the user to do them first, but it’s still down to the user. I’ve repeatedly encountered this issue that Claude doesn’t plan for engineering - it just plans to code - even with Claude.md and skills and such.

Claude as a replacement for engineers? Well, yeah, the marketing is just that: marketing.

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