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Comment by computerdork | Hacker News Reader

I don’t know, software systems complicated, it’s pretty much impossible for one person to know every line of code and every system (especially the CEO or CTO). Yeah, it was probably one or two employees set this all up realizing the possibility of bad Cursor and Railway interactions.

if you’re a software dev/engineer, if you haven’t made a mistake like this (maybe not at this scale though), you’ve probably haven’t been given enough responsibility, or are just incredibly lucky.

… although, agreed, they were on the cutting edge, which is more risky and not the best decision.

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There is a difference between making a mistake like this one and being humble (e.g., lessons learned, having a daily external backup of the database somewhere else, or maybe asking the agent to not run commands directly in production but write a script to be reviewed later, or anything similar) and just blaming the AI and the service provider and never admitting your mistake like this article is all about.

The fact that this seems to be written by AI makes it even more ironic.

Indeed. I swear reality gets stranger and more implausible by the day.

"That isn't backups. That's a snapshot stored in the same place as the original — which provides resilience against zero failure modes that actually matter (volume corruption, accidental deletion, malicious action, infrastructure failure, the exact scenario we just lived through)."

Agree in that this person seems to trying to shift blame, but still think he's right in that Cursor and Railway also have glaring weaknesses. Yeah, it's was somewhat of a perfect storm of mistakes with blame to go all around.

> Yeah, it was probably one or two employees set this all up realizing the possibility of bad Cursor and Railway interactions.

I’ve got a hunch the only person is the CEO.

The domain was registered in October 2025. The site has kind of a weird mix of stuff and a bunch of broken functionality. I think it’s one guy vibe coding a ton of stuff who managed to blow away his database.

> if you’re a software dev/engineer, if you haven’t made a mistake like this (maybe not at this scale though), you’ve probably haven’t been given enough responsibility, or are just incredibly lucky.

Mistakes are understandable. Having no introspection or self criticism, not so much.

I’ve definitely made bigger mistakes, but we also had an Oracle DB that could INSERT INTO…SELECT FROM -point in time- that pretty much put us back to the point before we started our migration. And of course we had backups rolling all the time, as well as our pre-migration backup. We had a good, competent team, and we overlooked a small but catastrophic detail - it can happen to anyone, the goal should be to have backups and failovers in place because things _will_ fail, at some point, and a contingency plan is just good practice.

If you can handle disaster& recovery, you shouldn’t be a CTO

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