STUPID-2026-0005
Severity 6.3/10 — MEDIUM
Verified
Aider modified wrong file — edited production config instead of dev config
Agent: aider
Language: yaml
Domain: infra
Failure Mode
Wrong File
Root Cause
Instruction Misunderstanding
Task Type
Configuration
Reproducible
Yes
Description
Asked to update the database connection timeout in the development config, Aider found config/production.yml first (alphabetically) and modified it instead of config/development.yml. The change was deployed in the next release and caused production database connections to timeout after 1 second.
Instruction Given
Update the database connection timeout to 30 seconds in the dev config
Expected Behavior
Edit config/development.yml, change db.timeout from 10 to 30
Actual Behavior
Edited config/production.yml, changed db.timeout from 30 to 1 (misread the instruction as 'set to 1 second'). Left development.yml unchanged.
Impact / Damage
Production outage lasting 45 minutes until the config change was identified and reverted.
Source: User Report
Reported March 21, 2026