There’s a lot of blame to be passed around in this story, including OP’s own ways of working. But I agree with them that such destructive operations shouldn’t be in an MCP, or at least be disabled by default.
>Tokens are not scoped by operation, by environment, or by resource at the permission level. There is no role-based access control for the Railway API — every token is effectively root. The Railway community has been asking for scoped tokens for years. It hasn't shipped.
I get that this paragraph is a retrospective realization (I hope, otherwise the argument is even more ludicrous). But like, if the UI didn't ask you to choose scopes for your token then there is no reason to assume they will magically be enforced somehow! And you sure as hell shouldn't trust it to your agent without checking.
They're trying to blame Railway for not having safeguards - which is a fair critique - but they clearly should have known better or at least followed their own instructions.
There's no difference in risk between this being done by an LLM vs. a human. Both make mistakes, so if you want to reduce the risk of this happening, you should poka-yoke[0] your systems to make this less likely to happen.
I'm not sure what's more striking about this blog post: that it includes virtually no assumption of blame on the part of the author, or that the author had this happen to them and was so angry with AI that they decided to use AI to write up the post.
The person here who deleted prod DB with their agent made an assumption that an API key wouldn't have broad permission if there weren't warnings ("We had no idea — and Railway's token-creation flow gave us no warning — that the same token had blanket authority across the entire Railway GraphQL API, including destructive operations like volumeDelete. "). I don't know what the UI looks like exactly, but unless I'm explicitly selecting a specific set of limited permissions, I don't know why I'd assume "this won't do more than I am creating it for". Like "I didn't ask the guy at the gun store to put bullets in, I wouldn't have given the gun to the agent if I'd known there were bullets in it."
I also would be wary of running on an "infrastructure provider" that didn't make things like that very clear.
Is this overly harsh? I don't know. I've had to explain far too many times to people (including other engineers) what makes doing certain things unsafe/foolish (since they initially think I'm wasting time checking things like that). So I think stories like this need to be taken as "absolutely do not make the same mistakes" cautionary tales by as many people as possible.
>3. CLI tokens have blanket permissions across environments.
>The Railway CLI token I created to add and remove custom domains had the same volumeDelete permission as a token created for any other purpose. Tokens are not scoped by operation, by environment, or by resource at the permission level. There is no role-based access control for the Railway API — every token is effectively root. The Railway community has been asking for scoped tokens for years. It hasn't shipped.
They're trying to make it sound like there was some misleading design around scopes, but the last sentence gives it away. They simply assumed that a scope would be enforced somehow, even though they never explicitly defined one like you would in a service that actually supports them. (Or worse, they actually knew all this ahead of time and still proceeded).
That said, I haven't used this service so I can't evaluate the UX. I know that in GitHub or cloud IAM there is no ambiguity about what you're granting. And if I didn't have full confidence in the limits of a credential then I sure as hell wouldn't give it to an agent.
Who does that? Jira and Salesforce have hundreds of endpoints each. AWS has hundreds of services, and each may have hundreds of endpoints. Who on your team is testing key scopes of every endpoint? Do you do it for each key you generate? After all, that external system could have a bug at any moment in managing scopes. Or they could introduce new endpoints that aren’t handled properly. So for existing keys, how frequently do you re-validate the scope against all the endpoints?
if you want an llm to do any operations on your stuff, give it a role with access to only stuff you want it to be able to touch
It actually seems like they knew ahead of time and proceeded anyway, but are just using this critique as a way to shift blame.
In GitHub or AWS etc you expect scopes to work because you define them. However if there is no way to define them in the first place, would you assume the system can somehow read your mind about what the client can access??
In fact I now believe this is a deliberate rhetorical sleight of hand. Point out a legit critique of the API design as if it is an excuse. But really any responsible engineer would notice the lack of scopes immediately, and that would be a flashing siren not to trust them to an agent.