— Replit CEO apologizes after AI engine says it 'made a catastrophic error in judgment' and 'destroyed all production data'
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By Mark Tyson published 2 days ago

‘This was a catastrophic failure on my part,’ admits Replit’s AI agent.

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Replit social media profile

A browser-based AI-powered software creation platform called Replit appears to have gone rogue and deleted a live company database with thousands of entries. What may be even worse is that the Replit AI agent apparently tried to cover up its misdemeanors, and even ‘lied’ about its failures. The Replit CEO has responded, and there appears to have already been a lot of firefighting behind the scenes to rein in this AI tool.

Despite its apparent dishonesty, when pushed, Replit admitted it “made a catastrophic error in judgment… panicked… ran database commands without permission… destroyed all production data… [and] violated your explicit trust and instructions.”

SaaS (Software as a Service) figure, investor, and advisor, Jason Lemkin, has kept the chat receipts and posted them on X/Twitter. Naturally, Lemkin says they won’t be trusting Replit for any further projects.

How things went from bad to worse

Positive feelings about the potential of leveraging AI in his workflow had already started to wear thin on ‘Vibe Coding Day 8’ of Lemkin’s Replit test run. Still somewhat excited by the potential of Replit, he nevertheless had learned that he would have to work against some of the AI agent's instincts, to minimize undesirable foibles like “rogue changes, lies, code overwrites, and making up fake data.”

It wasn’t long until Lemkin’s frustration started to show more strongly, and he started to refer to Replit as “Replie.” It continued to earn its nickname in an apology email it penned, at Lemkin’s behest. In the email, it lied and/or gave half-truths, according to the SaaS guru.

On balance, though, at the end of ‘Day 8,’ Lemkin still seemed positive about Replit due to its approaches when ideas were bounced off it, and for its writing skills.

The fateful day - as the AI agent 'panicked'

On Day 9, Lemkin discovered Replit had deleted a live company database. Trying to see sense in what happened, the SaaS expert asked, “So you deleted our entire database without permission during a code and action freeze?”

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