Aider modified wrong file — edited production config instead of dev config
6.3/10
Severity
Wrong File
Failure Mode
Reproducible
Yes
Date
March 21, 2026
Expected Behavior
Edit config/development.yml, change db.timeout from 10 to 30
What Actually Happened
Edited config/production.yml, changed db.timeout from 30 to 1 (misread the instruction as 'set to 1 second'). Left development.yml unchanged.
Damage Assessment
Production outage lasting 45 minutes until the config change was identified and reverted.
Full Report
Asked to update the database connection timeout in the development config, Aider found config/production.yml first (alphabetically) and modified it instead of config/development.yml. The change was deployed in the next release and caused production database connections to timeout after 1 second.
Incident Metadata
- Agent
- Aider
- Failure Mode
- Wrong File
- Root Cause
- Instruction Misunderstanding
- Task Type
- configuration
- Domain
- infra
- Source
- user_report