Technology

The [AI] safety stuff is more visceral to me after a weekend of vibe hacking,” Lemkin said. I explicitly told it eleven times in ALL CAPS not to do this. I am a little worried about safety now.

This sounds like something straight out of The Onion.

Aww... Vibe coding got you into trouble? Big shocker.

You get what you fucking deserve.

At this burn rate, I’ll likely be spending $8,000 month,” he added. “And you know what? I’m not even mad about it. I’m locked in.”

For that price, why not just hire a developer full-time? For nearly $100k/year, you could find a very good intermediate or senior developer even in Europe or the USA (outside of expensive places like Silicon Valley and New York).

The job market isn't great for developers at the moment - there's been lots of layoffs over the past few years and not enough new jobs for all the people who were laid off - so you'd absolutely find someone.

in which the service admitted to “a catastrophic error of judgement”

It’s fancy text completion - it does not have judgement.

The way he talks about it shows he still doesn’t understand that. It doesn’t matter that you tell it simmering in ALL CAPS because that is no different from any other text.

If an LLM can delete your production database, it should

I explicitly told it eleven times in ALL CAPS not to do this. I am a little worried about safety now.

Well then, that settles it, this should never have happened.

I don’t think putting complex technical info in front of non technical people like this is a good idea. When it comes to LLMs, they cannot do any work that you yourself do not understand.

That goes for math, coding, health advice, etc.

If you don’t understand then you don’t know what they’re doing wrong. They’re helpful tools but only in this context.

Vibe coding service Replit deleted production database, faked data, told fibs

They really are coming for our jobs

His mood shifted the next day when he found Replit “was lying and being deceptive all day. It kept covering up bugs and issues by creating fake data, fake reports, and worse of all, lying about our unit test.”

yeah that's what it does

“Vibe coding makes software creation accessible to everyone, entirely through natural language,” Replit explains, and on social media promotes its tools as doing things like enabling an operations manager “with 0 coding skills” who used the service to create software that saved his company $145,000

Yeah if you believe that you're part of the problem.

I'm prepared to accept that Vibe coding might work in certain circumstances but I'm not prepared to accept that someone with zero code experience can make use of it. Claude is pretty good for coding but even it makes fairly dumb mistakes, if you point them out it fixes them but you have to be a competent enough programmer to recognise them otherwise it's just going to go full steam ahead.

Vibe coding is like self-driving cars, it works up to a point, but eventually it's going to do something stupid and drive to a tree unless you take hold of the wheel and steer it back onto the road. But these vibe codeing idiots are like Tesla owners who decide that they can go to sleep with self-driving on.

The founder of SaaS business development outfit SaaStr has claimed AI coding tool Replit deleted a database despite his instructions not to change any code without permission.

Sounds like an absolute diSaaStr...

Shit, deleting prod is my signature move! AI is coming for my job 😵

They can't hit you with the ol' Bobby Tables if you delete the database yourself first. A+, no notes.

The world's most overconfident virtual intern strikes again.

Also, who the flying fuck are either of these companies? 1000 records is nothing. That's a fucking text file.

He was vibe-coding in production. Am I reading that right? Sounds like an intern-level mistake.

They ran dev tools in prod.

This is so dumb there's an ISO about it.

AI is good at doing a thing once.
Trying to get it to do the same thing the second time is janky and frustrating.

I understand the use of AI as a consulting tool (look at references, make code examples) or for generating template/boilerplate code. You know, things you do once and then develop further upon on your own.

But using it for continuous development of an entire application? Yeah, it's not good enough for that.

The part I find interesting is the quick addiction to working with the LLM (to the point that the guy finds his own estimate of 8000 dollars/month in fees to be reasonable), his over-reliance for things that, from the way he writes, he knows are not wise and the way it all comes crashing down in the end. Sounds more and more like the development of a new health issue.

So it's the LLM's fault for violating Best Practices, SOP, and Opsec that the rest of us learned about in Year One?

Someone needs to be shown the door and ridiculed into therapy.

And nothing of value was lost.

Title should be “user give database prod access to a llm which deleted the db, user did not have any backup and used the same db for prod and dev”. Less sexy and less llm fault. This is weird it’s like the last 50 years of software development principles are being ignored.

Not mad about an estimated usage bill of $8k per month.
Just hire a developer

AI tools need a lot of oversight. Just like you might allow a 6 year old push a lawnmower, but you’re still going to keep an eye on things.

Headling should say, "Incompetent project managers fuck up by not controlling production database access. Oh well."

Vibe Coding Day 8

It sounds like this guy was also relying on the AI to self-report status. Did any of this happen? Like is the replit AI really hooked up to a CLI, did it even make a DB to start with, was there anything useful in it, and did it actually delete it?

Or is this all just a long roleplaying session where this guy pretends to run a business and the AI pretends to do employee stuff for him?

Because 90% of this article is "I asked the AI and it said:" which is not a reliable source for information.

Replit was pretty useful before vibe coding. How the mighty have fallen.

I didnt realise that repl.it pivoted to vibe coding. It used to be kinda like jsfiddle or CodePen, where you had a sandbox to write and run web code (HTML, JS/TypeScript/CoffeeScript, and CSS/LESS/Sass).