People on this forum often "joke" about dropping the production database as a rite of passage for noobs

The difference is, a junior employee knows that killing prod is bad. An LLM doesn't know anything.

Don't be so sure that all, or even most, junior employees know any such thing. I've seen junior employees fired for doing silly things in prod before[1]

[1] Of course whatever more senior bozo granted the junior the rights to blow up the thing(s) they did should have been fired instead. That's not the way things work in the corporate world.

I like getting juniors into situations where they can blow up a db since it's the perfect introduction to backups.

And we only do it once (I didn't kill the db, but I did kick off a process thinking I was in a test environment).

Were you the guy sending test push notifications from Firebase to all users of Xperia phones last year? :D

Them knowing that it is bad isn't much of a consolation for the dead production

The magic that happen in someone's mind that leads to their actions matters very little for everyone else. Their actions and the consequences of their actions are what everyone else actually cares about

> as a rite of passage for noobs

I’ve been in the field for nearly 30 years. I’m far from incapable of such screwups.

Being a pro means you can fix anything you break - preferably before anyone noticies

I would hope that your experience has at least decreased the time between "first hearing about wierdness" and "realizing you accidnetally dropped prod". It's why pay generally increases with experience :D.