All of those things are reasonable questions. I've also watched videos talking on using Claude's built in hooks to do everything from "never git push, only prompt me that -I- should", and beyond, "if environment variable x = y (perhaps a la DEPLOYMENT_TARGET=prod) then do not execute any command that does not have a "dry run" mode" (or do not execute any commands, only tell me what to execute)."
I've also trashed production by "hand" in my previous time as an SRE.
> If the latter, then you cannot defend Claude's failure to act like a senior engineer in this situation.
This is rather black and white. Is it acceptable? No. Is it to be expected of a senior engineer? Yes, at times. If you have any length of career as an engineer or ops person and you tell me that you've never executed problematic commands whether or not caught by security nets, bluntly, you're lying.
Yeah the videos hyping up Claude and other such AI tools don't help matters.
For sure I've made mistakes. But I also don't write the following on my CV:
"PhD-level expert in infrastructure and trained on the entire internet of examples of what to do and what not to do; I can replace your entire infrastructure team and do everything else in your codebase too, without any review."
And yet that's how Claude is marketed. AI tools in general have been repeatedly marketed as PhD-level experts in _every_ area of information-era work, especially code. They encourage hands-off (or consent-fatigued) usage.
[Just to be clear, in case anyone wants to hire me in future: I've never accidentally deleted a production database. I've never even irrecoverably destroyed production data - nor had to rely on AWS (or another provider) to recover the data for me. I've made mistakes, mostly in sandbox environments, sometimes stressful ones in production, but nothing even close to what the OP did.]