Don't you think that's a bit of an inane comment to make about a setup you know nothing about?

Surely they are using read-only access.

We are obviously limiting access to be read-only for anything customer-facing (it will be able to put recommendations in the dashboard but not actually change things directly) but I think the point of GP's comment was literally just to get a reaction.

Did you mean to post this on Reddit instead of HN?

I get what you were trying to say, but the quality difference is actually extremely low.

When you do things in life, sometimes things go wrong. Oh no!

This is such a ridiculous objection for how beloved it is. Wide swathes of the public can't cope with any adversity or risk.

No, the point is that with human in the loop the downside is (usually!) rather limited, as common sense would stop obvious fuckups (ok, not always, but still).

With an agent (especially incompetently employed), the danger of unwittingly destroying your company (or at least, the crucial data/reputation) is rather higher. We are notoriously bad at estimating the downside risks in complex systems.

The most obvious case is the downside risks in complex financial constructs... things look great for a while ... until a sudden surprising collapse arrives and totally destroys all the upside you think you have created.

There is a tradeoff to be considered between the utility gained from using the stuff, minus the risk severity/likelihood, plus available mitigations. As someone else posted, none of us are in a position to make that balanced post because we don't know if the guy has an airgapped backup or not etc.

In any case, GP's post was not such a balanced consideration; it was just parroting a beloved risk-aversion meme that can easily be deployed against building anything (what if the building falls on top of someone?) or even leaving home to go to work ("travelling in a hunk of steel at lethal speeds – let me assure you that absolutely nothing can go wrong here, mate.")

What I find tiresome about that meme is the presumption that "something can go wrong" is useful input on its own. It's not. Mistakes are made all the time, the only way to avoid that is to stop breathing. Even in the process of me standing up and going to the loo, something can go wrong.

If the guy wants to make a case that it's too dangerous for the expected benefits, he has to actually make that case. Saying "risk exists" with no elaboration is a waste of HTML. "something can go wrong" every time he swallows food, yet mysteriously he still does it.

(the suicide analogies may seem mean-spirited, but I kind of mean it. If you consider every action primarily from a standpoint of "what harm or irreversible change can result from this", the only permissible path is to do nothing. To be moral is to be as close as possible to a rock or another inanimate object.)

An agent will read your comment and take it as a challenge to show something can go wrong. Thanks for prompt injecting, mate. /s