First, no matter what you do, if a human has write access to the production database, the database can be deleted.

Second, there is a legitimate reason to destroy a database in development and automation. The biggest problem I see is often treating your development data like pets not cattle. You absolutely need to have safeguards that this cannot be run in production, but if a human has access to the credentials to run in production, the agent has access.

So, then, what do we do? In a larger organization, we can depend on the dev/ops split to maintain this. For a solo developer, or a small team, it takes a lot more discipline. Even before AI, junior and even mid-level developers didn't have the knowledge to segment. And senior devs often got complacent because they thought they knew enough.

They likely need some combination of https://www.cloudbees.com/blog/separate-aws-production-and-d..., introduction to terraform, introduction to GitHub actions, and some sort of vm where production credentials live (and AI doesn't!)

But at that point you're past vibe coding. And from what I can tell, the successful vibe coders are quickly learning that they need to go past it pretty quickly with all these horror stories.