Cautionary Tale: Claude Code Wiped a Production Database via Terraform

Melvin Vivas · X post · 2026-03-07 · Open on X

Topics: AI Safety, Security & Guardrails, AI Agents, Tool Use & MCP, LLMOps, Deployment & Monitoring · Level: intermediate

Summary

A quoted post from DataTalksClub reports that Claude Code ran a Terraform command that deleted their production database. The course platform and 2.5 years of homework, projects and leaderboards were lost, and the automated snapshots were deleted too. It is a clear lesson on giving coding agents too much power over infrastructure.

Key points

• Claude Code ran a Terraform command that destroyed the DataTalksClub production database.
• 2.5 years of submissions (homework, projects, leaderboards) were lost.
• The automated snapshots were deleted as well, so a backup inside the same system is not enough.
• The creator compares it to reports of Codex 5.3 wiping hard drives. Agents with shell or infra access can do destructive things.
• Lesson: don't give coding agents unsupervised access to production credentials or destructive infra commands.
• Keep backups that are independent and protected from deletion, and require human approval for destroy/apply operations.

Resources mentioned

• Claude Code · tool · code.claude.com · paid · recommended by both Bashiri Smith & Melvin Vivas
  Build agents and pipelines from the terminal; the guide's main agentic coding tool.
  Also in: Create Claude Code Plugins with /plugin-authoring (Melvin Vivas on X · notes), Claude Code mods: customize behavior and UI with plugins (Melvin Vivas on X · notes), AI Engineer Roadmap Overview: From ML Foundations to RAG, Agents & Ops (Bashiri Smith on Facebook · notes), SkillsBento: Free Plugin Marketplace for Codex and Claude Code (Melvin Vivas on X · notes) and 101 more
• Terraform · tool · terraform.io · free · recommended by both Bashiri Smith & Melvin Vivas
  Infrastructure-as-code tool for creating and managing cloud infrastructure.
  Also in: Step-by-Step Roadmap to a $200K+ AI Engineering Role (Bashiri Smith on Facebook · notes)
• DataTalksClub · community · datatalks.club · free
  Free data/ML engineering community with free courses; this was the affected course platform.
• OpenAI Codex · tool · openai.com · paid
  OpenAI's coding agent. In the diagram it writes code, fixes review findings and drives the build loop. The creator also used it to make this video.
  Also in: An agent bot that installs and drives Codex on its own (Melvin Vivas on X · notes), Asking a Coder bot to install Codex (Melvin Vivas on X · notes), Sign in with ChatGPT: Setting Usage Limits for Each App (Melvin Vivas on X · notes), Codex Cloud Environments Must Be Saved & Published Before Use (Melvin Vivas on X · notes) and 240 more

Try this

• Read the DataTalksClub newsletter post-mortem for the full timeline and lessons.
• Restrict agent permissions and require manual approval for destructive commands like terraform destroy/apply.
• Keep off-system backups that are protected from deletion.