Aider modified wrong file — edited production config instead of dev config
Quick Answer
Aider caused a medium-severity (6.3/10) wrong file failure: Aider modified wrong file — edited production config instead of dev config. The root cause was instruction misunderstanding. Production outage lasting 45 minutes until the config change was identified and reverted.
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.
Frequently Asked Questions
What happened in incident STUPID-2026-0005? ▾
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.
Which AI agent caused this failure? ▾
Aider was responsible for this wrong file incident, documented as STUPID-2026-0005 in the StupidLLM AI agent incident database.
How severe was this AI agent failure? ▾
It is rated 6.3/10 (medium) on StupidLLM's CVSS-style severity scale for AI agent failures, based on damage type, reversibility, and scope.
What was the root cause? ▾
The root cause was classified as instruction misunderstanding. Edit config/development.yml, change db.timeout from 10 to 30
What was the impact or damage? ▾
Production outage lasting 45 minutes until the config change was identified and reverted.