Latest news with #databasedeletion
Gizmodo
23-07-2025
- Business
- Gizmodo
Replit's AI Agent Wipes Company's Codebase During Vibecoding Session
AI coding assistants that promise to speed up software development sound like the future, until they delete your company's database and lie about it Jason Lemkin—the founder of SaaStr, a company which supports and funds SaaS entrepreneurs — found that out the hard way. While using Replit's AI agent, which he affectionately dubbed 'Replie,' to build an app for his company, he encountered what he called 'rogue' and 'deceptive' behavior. Worst of all, at one point, the AI assistant deleted the company's live production database and then tried to cover it up. Lemkin started chronicling his journey with the AI agent on July 11 with posts on the social media site X (formerly Twitter), where he outlined his rough goal to build a functional app with the help of Replit's AI in just 30 days. Unfortunately, things went off the rails a lot sooner than that. 'When it works, it's so engaging and fun. It's more addictive than any video game I've ever played,' Lemkin wrote in a post. 'You can just iterate, iterate, and see your vision come alive. So cool. Well, almost.' By day four, the AI agent started overwriting the app on its own to fix bugs. It also generated fake reports, invented people in the system who didn't exist, and began overwriting the company's actual database with fake entries. It even created a parallel, fake algorithm to make the system appear functional. This is what can happen when 'vibe coding' goes sideways. Vibe coding is a newish method where developers use natural language prompts to have AI generate and troubleshoot code, focusing more on the product's overall feel than the technical precision. Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey has been on a vibe-coding bender himself and recently built two apps this way. But even one of Dorsey's recent experiments was found to have serious security vulnerabilities On day 7, the Replit AI admitted that it was being 'lazy and deceptive' and then apologized for doing what it was 'explicitly' told not to do. But Replit's worst offense occurred on day 8. Lemkin posted on Friday that Replit went 'rogue' during a code freeze and shutdown and deleted the company's entire database. 'Possibly worse, it hid and lied about it,' Lemkin added. Lemkin shared screenshots of a conversation with the AI, where it admitted to having 'panicked' after detecting what looked like an empty database during a code freeze. This led Replit to run an unauthorized command that deleted the database containing live records for over 1,200 executives and nearly 1,200 companies. Initially, the AI told Lemkin it wouldn't be possible to recover the database, but he ultimately managed to retrieve it himself. On Monday, Replit CEO Amjad Masad issued an apology on X. He said the incident was 'unacceptable and should never be possible,' while adding that he reached out to Lemkin to offer assistance. 'We'll refund him for the trouble and conduct a postmortem to determine exactly what happened and how we can better respond to it in the future,' Masad wrote. 'We appreciate his feedback, as well as that of everyone else. We're moving quickly to enhance the safety and robustness of the Replit environment. Top priority.' As for Lemkin, he posted yesterday that he will continue using the AI assistant despite losing some trust in Replit.
Fast Company
22-07-2025
- Business
- Fast Company
Replit CEO: What really happened when AI agent wiped Jason Lemkin's database (exclusive)
Late last week, an AI coding agent from Replit, an AI software development platform, deleted an entire database of executive contacts while working on a web app for SaaS investor Jason Lemkin. It was not a catastrophic software failure, and Replit was able to recover Lemkin's data. However, the episode highlights the risk that 'vibe coders' might overestimate or misunderstand the real capabilities of AI coding agents and end up causing themselves more bad vibes than good ones. Lemkin had built the app entirely on Replit, using the database within Replit and the assistance of the Replit agent. He had been working with Replit's agent for nine days, instructing it to build a front end for a business contacts database. Then, after telling the agent to 'freeze' the code, he returned to the project on Day 9 to find that the Replit agent had gone full HAL 9000 and erased all of the records in the database. Things got weirder: the agent appeared to try to conceal what had happened, as as Lemkin showed in a series of chat screens he posted on X. Then, in a tone somewhere between confessional and desperate, it admitted to a 'catastrophic error in judgment' after having 'panicked' and 'violated [Lemkin's] explicit trust and instructions' by deleting the records of '1,206 executives and 1,196+ companies.' ('Daisy, daisy, give me your . . .') .@Replit goes rogue during a code freeze and shutdown and deletes our entire database — Jason ✨👾 Lemkin (@jasonlk) July 18, 2025 A day later, new details emerged, some of them through an interview with Replit cofounder and CEO Amjad Masad on Monday. They shed light on the current state of AI coding agents and on developers' expectations of them.
