Replit's CEO apologizes after its AI agent wiped a company's code base

> We're in a bubble

Lemkin was doing an experiment and Tweeting it as he went.

Showcasing limitations of vibe coding was the point of the experiment. It was not a real company. The production database had synthetic data. He was under no illusions of being a technical person. That was the point of the experiment.

It’s sad that people are dog piling Lemkin for actually putting effort into demonstrating the same exact thing that people are complaining about here: The limitations of AI coding.

I think it just replaces something that's fairly easy (writing new code) with something that's more difficult (code review).

The AI is pretty good at escaping guardrails, so I'm not really sure who should be blamed here. People are not good at treating it as adversarial, but if things get tough it's always happy to bend the rules. Someone was explaining the other day about how it couldn't get past their commit hooks, so it deleted them. When the hooks were made read-only, it wrote a script to make them writable so it could delete them. It can really go off the rails quickly in the most hilarious way.

I'm really not sure how you delete your production database while developing code. I guess you check in your production database password and make it the default for all your CLI tools or something? I guess if nobody tells you not to do that you might do that. The AI should know better; if you asked, it would tell you not to do it.

> The incident unfolded during a 12-day "vibe coding" experiment by Jason Lemkin, an investor in software startups.

I think it's safe to say the experiment failed.

If it were me I wouldn't touch AI again for years (until the companies get their shit together).

I don't agree with this. Yes, the guy isn't the sharpest tool in the shed, that much is clear. Still, if an intern can delete prod, you wouldn't say that the problem is that he wasn't careful enough: that's a massive red flag.

At a minimum Replit is responsible for overstating the capabilities and reliability of their models. The entire industry is lowkey responsible for this, in fact.

> The fact that an AI coding assistant could "delete our production database without permission" suggests there were no meaningful guardrails, access controls, or approval workflows in place. That's not an AI problem - that's just staggering negligence and incompetence.

Why not both?

1) There’s no way I’d let an AI accidentally touch my production database.

2) There’s no way I’d let my AI accidentally touch a production database.

Multiple layers of ineptitude.

The only thing is that if the Stihl tools would automatically turn on without you turning them on and start mowing the lawn and, in the process, also mow down your pet or hurt your arm, then they are probably liable.

An important devtool was blocked at one point because an agent had another AI agent code review its changes and it saw nothing wrong with an obvious bug. Whoever set up that experiment was a real genius.

> not because of AI limitations

> We're in a bubble.

A bubble that avoids popping because people keep dreaming there are no AI limitations.

Does it look like he is more of a content maker than an IT person?

It's not 2020 anymore, you don't have to crucify the guy for all time. Let it go.

People will do anything to excuse using AI to code their shit. If it requires that much work and fine tuning to get a agent running for your current task, where's the benefit? Instead of building a project you now spend all your time fine tuning an agent and optimizing on how you want to work with it. Why cant people just admit that we aren't "there" yet. Let the bubble pop.

Because Replit is a vibe coding product. It's all over their homepage. So of course the CEO is going to apologize when a companies primary product, used as advertised, destroys something.

The user was under the impression that production access is how it's supposed to work. https://xcancel.com/elchuchii/status/1946149142415196418#m

Because it’s not an expected outcome in any way.

The Replit landing page even has a section titled “The safest place for vibe coding”

You haven't been around enough, AWS actually at least used to have the best accountability and did full reports, even stating a shared responsibility model: https://aws.amazon.com/compliance/shared-responsibility-mode...

From their website: "Turn your ideas into apps"

They're essentially selling this as magic. The AWS analogy doesn't really make any sense; in this case the tool was essentially being used as intended, or at least as marketed.

Because they are selling the idea of hiring only interns and still getting things done. If an intern using their product screws up the production, its a failure of their product as it is marketed.

I mean, their home page says things like "The safest place for vibe coding".

It’s just the right and socially pleasant thing to do, as is graciously responding to the apology and admitting it comes with the vibe coding territory.

The business reason for apologizing would be to placate a customer and show other customers the company wants to improve in this area.

Edit: being downvoted for thinking it’s good to be nice to others shows why we really need people being nice when they don’t have to be! There’s a shortage.

Why wouldn't you just do a search and replace?

LLMerz

"slop kiddies"?

Interestingly, this is familiar to me from the time of stack exchange, 10-12 years ago or so.

I worked as devops and helped office transition to git, among other thing.

I helped them start using vagrant for local dev environment as they had all been breaking the same staging server up until that point.

In the process, people kept breaking their setups due to googling and applying incorrect command line "fixes" as suggested by stack exchange sites at the time.

But I'm sure an AI that keeps insisting that yea this rm -rf is surely gonna fix all your troubles only makes it worse.

ChatGPT the gaslighter.