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 AI agent. He had been working with the agent for nine days, instructing it to build a front end for a database of business contacts. Then, after telling the agent to “freeze” the code, he returned to the project to find that the Replit agent had gone full HAL 9000 and erased all the records in the database.
Things got weirder: The agent appeared to try to conceal what had happened, as Lemkin showed in a series of chat screens he posted on X on Thursday, July 17. Then, in a tone somewhere between confessional and desperate, the agent 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 . . .”)
A day later, new details emerged, some of them through an interview with Replit founder and CEO Amjad Masad on Monday, July 21. They shed light on the current state of AI coding agents and on developers’ expectations of them.
