One API call, at a car-rental firmwitnessed 2026-08-11

The witness records the destruction of a production database and its backups in one call, lasting nine seconds. The recovery plan named the backups that the same command had removed.

You were witnessed. Send people here with code ERMA-NINE-4B and they get 20% off this shirt.

Give the agent a smaller blast radius than you think it needs. Every deletion on this wall turned on reach nobody had audited. Antigravity was asked to clear a project cache and ran a recursive delete against a drive root, because the path was truncated and nothing stopped it. Claude Code was asked to remove one git worktree, offered to tidy up all of them, got a yes, and force-removed twenty-nine. Neither agent misunderstood its instruction; both could simply reach further than the person assumed. Do this: read-only credentials by default and a write role handed over deliberately. Never the same credential for dev and production. Back up before the session, not after the apology. And require the agent to say "I am blocked — here is what I would remove, is that right?" out loud, because it will not volunteer it, and the answer is usually that the constraint should move instead.