Yes sure, there seems to be lots of ways this issue could have been mitigated, but as other comments said, this mostly happened because the author didn't do its proper homework about how the service they rely their whole product works.
If the API replied "Are you sure (Y/N)?" the AI, in the mode it was in, guardrails completely pushed off the side of the road, it would have just said "Yes" anyway.
If you needed to make two API calls, one to stage the delete and the other to execute it (i.e. the "commit" phase), the AI would have looked up what it needed to do, and done that instead.
It's a privilege issue, not an execution issue.
The whole “vibecoding” argument is stupid. Everyone is pissed because it’s taking their jobs and saying, “welp, you shouldn’t have vibe coded then” when issues like this occur. Issues like this occurred and still occur without vibe coding. Probably much more often by actual people than AI. I’m frustrated too; I love coding. I’ve been doing it for 15 years. But either way, we have to get used to the idea that we won’t be coding in the future. The whole industry is moving that way and moving fast. You can’t do anything to change it. You can’t deny that you can complete projects 1000000x faster when coding with agents than by your own hands. Adapt. Stop complaining.
Nope, their complaint about having an API ask if you should delete or not clearly shows the author has no idea how API works. They could have said that a deletion API could require 2 different requests, one for the deletion request that returns a token and another for confirmation with the token returned by the first request, but this is not what they said so.
Also as others have said, this wouldn't have helped anyway because the AI could just call both APIs one after another and the result would be the same, especially if the first request returns "call this other endpoint with this token to confirm your deletion request".
How much experience do you have with LLMs?
One of the first lessons developers learn after working with LLMs a bit, is that the LLM will hallucinate, and you need to be alert and competent enough to recognize when it happens. Sort of like a car with steering assist requires you to pay attention and take personal responsibility for anything that happens.
As a consequence of that, one of the second lessons developers learn after working with LLMs a bit, is that there is no such thing as "an explicit rule" for LLMs. "Explicit rules" can still be ignored by an LLM under many different circumstances. The sooner the developer learns this fact, the sooner they can be productive with LLMs, and the less likely they are to delete their own production database and blame it on their tools with which they're unfamiliar.
The “industry” has an answer to this problem. It’s called a blameless post-mortem.
Don’t blindly externalise the blame onto everyone else, assume we work in a imperfect world and build safety around the process such that this doesn’t / can’t happen again.
If all you do is finger point to shift the blame, then you’ll have an infinite number of avoidable incidents to show for it
> Issues like this occurred and still occur without vibe coding
Right and so you focus on fixing the elements of the process you can control.