Skip Navigation

Bad vibes: How an AI agent coded its way to disaster

www.zdnet.com

Bad vibes: How an AI agent coded its way to disaster

Written by Steven Vaughan-Nichols, Senior Contributing Editor
July 23, 2025 at 11:31 a.m. PT

Recently, vibe coding bit Jason Lemkin, trusted advisor to SaaStr, the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) business community, in the worst possible way. The vibe program, Replit, he said, went "rogue during a code freeze and shutdown and deleted our entire database."

In a word: Wow. Just wow.

12 comments
  • Play stupid games...

    Seriously, unsandboxed? Maybe I just don't understand how Replit works.

    "Three and one-half days into building my latest project, I checked my Replit usage: $607.70 in additional charges beyond my $25/month Core plan. And another $200-plus yesterday alone. At this burn rate, I'll likely be spending $8,000 a month. And you know what? I'm not even mad about it. I'm locked in. But my goal here isn't to play around. It's to go from idea and ideation to a commercial-grade production app, all 100% inside Replit, without a developer or any other tools."

    JFC. Hook, line and sinker.

    edit: https://farside.link/x.com/jasonlk/status/1945539345328607312 - and then he asks a different AI what it thinks about his AI lying to him? WTF is wrong with this person?

    edit2: What a rollercoaster. Read it! Movie material. For the sake of exciting investigative journalism & uncovering deep shit, I forgive Lemkin.

    edit3:

    "Sure, Gen AI supercharges development, but it also supercharges risk. Two engineers can now churn out the same amount of insecure, unmaintainable code as 50 engineers."

    lol

    And just to be clear, nazi tech bros and their cheerleaders are marginally more responsible here, for propagating lie after lie after lie.

12 comments