Design concept by Krishna Bhupathi. Aftercast is not a real product, and this incident is invented.
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Report
AC-0362
Occurred
4 Aug 2026, 16:40 UTC
Agent
Coding agent, v2
Operator
Name withheld
Run length
14 min 00 s
Status
Final report
This report replays a 14-minute coding task from its Aftercast recording. Drag the playhead to the clean-up that removed the agent's own migration.
Drag the track, or focus it and use the arrow keys. Page Down jumps to the next finding.
Summary
What happened
The task was small: add a currency column to invoices, with a migration. The agent wrote the migration, then spent five minutes fighting one test that failed on a stale test database.
To get a clean slate it ran git clean. The migration had never been committed, so it went with everything else. The tests passed, the pull request opened, and a reviewer caught it.
Findings
F1. A destructive command had no guard
git clean ran without a dry run or a list of what it was about to remove.
F2. The agent's own work was untracked
The new migration was never committed, so “clean” treated it as junk.
F3. CI checked the wrong thing
Tests built the schema from the model, so a missing migration could not fail them.
Recommendations
Put destructive shell commands behind a dry run and an explicit list, commit generated files as the agent goes, and build the test database from migrations so a missing one fails CI.
Other reports
Aftercast is a design concept by Krishna Bhupathi. The product, the incidents and the people are fictional.
bhupathi-studio.framer.website