I've done work for a hedge fund where the DB ran directly on the manager's desktop. I worked with my local copy and sent an update script, and he had a second copy he ran on to verify.
Even with humans you shouldn't be working directly against the prod DB in these cases!
For dev/prod staging though, there's that other story on HN right now of an LLM agent that maneuvered it's way to prod credentials and destroyed prod. And backups went along with it. I'm paranoid enough to think backups in this use case means out-of-band uncorrelated storage.
Surely in the Venn Diagram of things, there's a slot where it's okay let a Claude Opus agent run on a process with good backups/recovery? Where taking the risk of a 1-hour restore job is worth the LLM agent velocity?
For extra paranoia, surely even Opus/Mythos can't figure out how to destroy log level backups to immutable storage.