alt Hacker NewsYeah, using cp to backup sqlite is a very bad idea. And yet, unless you know this, this is what Claude etc will implement for you. Every friggin' time.
Replies
HoldOnAMinute • today at 10:10 PM
It works fine as long as no one is writing to the sqlite file and you are not in WAL mode, which is not the default.
chasil • today at 2:39 PM
It's fine if you run the equivalent of "init 1" first.
Does your OS have a single-user mode?
Well, humans also default to 'cp' until they learn the better pattern or find out their backup is missing data.
Also, my n=1 is that I told Claude to create a `make backup` task and it used .backup.
I don't understand the double standard though. Why do we pretend us humans are immaculate in these AI convos? If you had the prescience to be the guy who looked up how to properly back up an sqlite db, you'd have the prescience to get Claude to read docs. It's the same corner cut.
There's this weird contradiction where we both expect and don't expect AI to do anything well. We expect it to yolo the correct solution without docs since that's what we tried to make it do. And if it makes the error a human would make without docs, of course it did, it's just AI. Or, it shouldn't have to read docs, it's AI.