> The incident unfolded during a 12-day "vibe coding" experiment by Jason Lemkin
A 12-day unsupervised "experiment" in production?
> It deleted our production database without permission," Lemkin wrote on X on Friday.
"Without permission"? You mean permission given verbally? If an AI agent has access, it has permission. Permissions aren't something you establish with an LLM by conversing with it.
> Jason Lemkin, an investor in software startups
It tells us something about the hype machine when investors in AI are clueless (or even plainly delusional; see Geoff Lewis) about how LLMs work.
Honestly, the person who decided to give an LLM Agent full and unrestricted access to their production database is the person who deserves all the blame. What an absolutely silly decision. I don't even give myself unrestricted access to production databases.
My 2 cents, AI tools benefit from standard software best practices just like everyone else. I use Devcontainers in vscode so that the agent can't blow up my host machine, I use 1 git commit per AI "task", and have CI/CD coverage for even my hobby projects now. When I go to production, I use CDK + self-mutating pipelines to manage deployments.
Having a read only replica of the prod database available via MCP is great, blanket permissive credentials is insane.
Not sure why CEO should apologize here, person knew there were risks with vibe coding and they still did it with their production data.
Never heard AWS CEO apologizing for their customers when their interns decided to run a migration against production database and accidentally wiped off everything
> …the company's AI coding agent deleted a code base and lied about its data.
Well, lying about it certainly human-like behavior, human-like AGI must be just around the corner!
/s
But really, full access to a production database? How many good engineer’s advice you need to ignore to do that? Who was consulted before running the experiment?
Or was it just a “if you say so boss…” kind of thing?
This is a perfect case study in why AI coding tools aren't replacing professional developers anytime soon - not because of AI limitations, but because of spectacularly poor judgment by people who fundamentally don't understand software development or basic operational security.
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.
Replit has nothing to apologize for, just like the CEO of Stihl doesn't need to address every instance of an incompetent user cutting their own arm off with one of their chainsaws.
Edit:
> The incident unfolded during a 12-day "vibe coding" experiment by Jason Lemkin, an investor in software startups.
But replit isn’t just a coding assistant - it’s value is that it handles all the associated parts of launching a web app. It manages api secrets, hosts the app, does user authentication, etc. And its target user is “semi-technical”, you don’t even see the code it writes by default.
Creating a db and not accidentally permanently deleting it is one of the capabilities it should have.
> but because of spectacularly poor judgment by people who fundamentally don't understand software development or basic operational security.
> Replit has nothing to apologize for
I completely disagree. Replit is at the forefront of the "build apps with AI" movement - they actively market themselves to non-coders, and the title on their homepage is literally "Turn your ideas into apps".
So it would be bit rich of them to market these tools, which happen to fail spectacularly at inopportune times, and then blame their users for not being experienced with secure code deployment practices.
I do agree we're in a bubble, and the fundamental limitations of these kinds of tools is starting to become more apparent to the public at large (not just software engineers), but that doesn't mean that we should let those at the forefront of blowing this bubble off the hook.
I'm dont think the AI is so much to blame. Giving an LLM that forgets previous instructions and rules access to prod is just idiotic. The computer promised not to execute commands, but it forgot. Makes me curious what policy that company has for granting interns and juniors access to prod.
I see numerous negative comments about "expected by vibe coding", but the apology suggests that they are working on making Replit a production-ready platform and listening to customers.
I'm sure no-code platforms have had similar scepticism before, but the point here is that these are not for developers. There are many people who don't know how to code, and they want something simple and fast to get started. These platforms (Replit, V0, Lovable, etc.) are offering that.
Are they doing the post-mortem with another AI agent?
AI is a great tool. It also allows people who have no business touching certain systems to go in there unaware of their lack of knowledge messing everything in the process. One particularly nasty effect I have had few times recently is frontend devs messing up their own dev infrastructure to which they have access, but are supposed to ask devops for help when needed, because copilot told them this is the way to "fix" some imaginary problem that actually was them using a wrong api or making other mistake possible to be made by only a person who pastes code between AI/IDE without even reading it.
This wasn’t a real company. The production database didn’t have real customers. The person doing the vibe coding had no illusions that they were creating a production-ready app.
This was an experiment by Jason Lemkin to test the reality of vibe coding: As a non-technical person he wanted to see how much he could accomplish and where it went wrong.
So all of the angry comments about someone vibe-coding to drop the production DB can relax. Demonstrating these kind of risks was the point. No customers were harmed in this experiment.
What happened here was to be expected if you have used agentic coding.
Last weeks I have also been testing AI coding agents, in my case Claude Code because it seems like it is the state of the art (also tried Gemini Cli and Amp).
Some conclusions about this:
- The agentic part really makes it better than Copilot & others. You have to see it iterating and fixing errors using feedback from tests, lint, LSP... it gives the ilusion of a human working.
- It's like a savant human, with an encyclopedic knowledge and hability to spit code faster than me. But like a human it benefits from having, tests, a good architecture (no 20k line code file, pls).
- Before it changes code you have to make it create a plan of what he is going to do. In Claude Code this is simple, is a mode you switch to with Shift-tab. In this mode instead of generating code it just spits a plan in Markdown, you read it suggest changes and when it look ok you tell it to start implementing it.
As an agent it shines on things where it can get a nice feedback and iterate to a solution. One dumb example I found cool was when trying to update a Flutter app that I hadn't touched in a year.
And if you use Flutter you know what did happen, Flutter had to upgrade but before it required updating Android SDK, then Android Gradle Plugin, and another thing, and some other thing to infinite... It's a thing I hate because I have done too many times.
So I tried by hand and after 40 mins of suffering I thought about opening Gemini Cli and tell it to update the project. Then it began executing one command and then reading the error and execute another one to fix the error, then another error that pointed to a page in the Android docs, so it opened that page, read it and fixed that problem, then the next and another one...
So in 2 minutes I had my Flutter project updated and working. I don't know if this is human level intelligence and I don't care, for me it's a sharp tool that can do things like this 10x faster than me.
You can have you AGI hype, I'm happy for the future when I will have a tool like this to help me work.
38 comments
[ 2.4 ms ] story [ 43.0 ms ] threadA 12-day unsupervised "experiment" in production?
> It deleted our production database without permission," Lemkin wrote on X on Friday.
"Without permission"? You mean permission given verbally? If an AI agent has access, it has permission. Permissions aren't something you establish with an LLM by conversing with it.
> Jason Lemkin, an investor in software startups
It tells us something about the hype machine when investors in AI are clueless (or even plainly delusional; see Geoff Lewis) about how LLMs work.
Having a read only replica of the prod database available via MCP is great, blanket permissive credentials is insane.
Never heard AWS CEO apologizing for their customers when their interns decided to run a migration against production database and accidentally wiped off everything
Is this common, operating with no backups?
With backups this would be a glitch not a problem worthy of headlines on multiple sites.
Any CYO should have backups and security as their first and second priority if the company is of any size.
Well, lying about it certainly human-like behavior, human-like AGI must be just around the corner!
/s
But really, full access to a production database? How many good engineer’s advice you need to ignore to do that? Who was consulted before running the experiment?
Or was it just a “if you say so boss…” kind of thing?
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.
Replit has nothing to apologize for, just like the CEO of Stihl doesn't need to address every instance of an incompetent user cutting their own arm off with one of their chainsaws.
Edit:
> The incident unfolded during a 12-day "vibe coding" experiment by Jason Lemkin, an investor in software startups.
We're in a bubble.
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).
Creating a db and not accidentally permanently deleting it is one of the capabilities it should have.
> Replit has nothing to apologize for
I completely disagree. Replit is at the forefront of the "build apps with AI" movement - they actively market themselves to non-coders, and the title on their homepage is literally "Turn your ideas into apps".
So it would be bit rich of them to market these tools, which happen to fail spectacularly at inopportune times, and then blame their users for not being experienced with secure code deployment practices.
I do agree we're in a bubble, and the fundamental limitations of these kinds of tools is starting to become more apparent to the public at large (not just software engineers), but that doesn't mean that we should let those at the forefront of blowing this bubble off the hook.
I see numerous negative comments about "expected by vibe coding", but the apology suggests that they are working on making Replit a production-ready platform and listening to customers.
I'm sure no-code platforms have had similar scepticism before, but the point here is that these are not for developers. There are many people who don't know how to code, and they want something simple and fast to get started. These platforms (Replit, V0, Lovable, etc.) are offering that.
AI is a great tool. It also allows people who have no business touching certain systems to go in there unaware of their lack of knowledge messing everything in the process. One particularly nasty effect I have had few times recently is frontend devs messing up their own dev infrastructure to which they have access, but are supposed to ask devops for help when needed, because copilot told them this is the way to "fix" some imaginary problem that actually was them using a wrong api or making other mistake possible to be made by only a person who pastes code between AI/IDE without even reading it.
If you have as much as 1 year experience, your job is safe from AI: you'll make mountains of money unfucking all the AI fuckups.
We're at the uncanny valley stage in AI agents, at least from my perspective.
This was an experiment by Jason Lemkin to test the reality of vibe coding: As a non-technical person he wanted to see how much he could accomplish and where it went wrong.
So all of the angry comments about someone vibe-coding to drop the production DB can relax. Demonstrating these kind of risks was the point. No customers were harmed in this experiment.
Last weeks I have also been testing AI coding agents, in my case Claude Code because it seems like it is the state of the art (also tried Gemini Cli and Amp).
Some conclusions about this:
- The agentic part really makes it better than Copilot & others. You have to see it iterating and fixing errors using feedback from tests, lint, LSP... it gives the ilusion of a human working.
- It's like a savant human, with an encyclopedic knowledge and hability to spit code faster than me. But like a human it benefits from having, tests, a good architecture (no 20k line code file, pls).
- Before it changes code you have to make it create a plan of what he is going to do. In Claude Code this is simple, is a mode you switch to with Shift-tab. In this mode instead of generating code it just spits a plan in Markdown, you read it suggest changes and when it look ok you tell it to start implementing it.
- You have to try it seriously to see where it can benefit your workflow. Give it 5 minutes (https://signalvnoise.com/posts/3124-give-it-five-minutes).
As an agent it shines on things where it can get a nice feedback and iterate to a solution. One dumb example I found cool was when trying to update a Flutter app that I hadn't touched in a year.
And if you use Flutter you know what did happen, Flutter had to upgrade but before it required updating Android SDK, then Android Gradle Plugin, and another thing, and some other thing to infinite... It's a thing I hate because I have done too many times.
So I tried by hand and after 40 mins of suffering I thought about opening Gemini Cli and tell it to update the project. Then it began executing one command and then reading the error and execute another one to fix the error, then another error that pointed to a page in the Android docs, so it opened that page, read it and fixed that problem, then the next and another one...
So in 2 minutes I had my Flutter project updated and working. I don't know if this is human level intelligence and I don't care, for me it's a sharp tool that can do things like this 10x faster than me.
You can have you AGI hype, I'm happy for the future when I will have a tool like this to help me work.