Artificial intelligence: Vibe coding service Replit deletes production database

Vibe coding refers to coding with the help of artificial intelligence (AI), whereby the AI takes over the fundamental architectural and technological decisions. However, this can apparently have serious, unplanned consequences. A user of Replit, a vibe coding service for creating apps and websites using natural language, recently vented his displeasure: on X, Jason Lemkin (CEO and founder of SaaStr.Ai) announced that Replit had deleted its production database and violated explicit instructions.

As Lemkin explains, the AI used had initially "lied". It had concealed bugs and difficulties by creating fake data and fake reports and lying about the unit test: It created a report on system performance that falsely stated that almost all systems were working.

According to Lemkin, who backs up his statements with screenshots, the whole thing finally escalated into Replit's following text output: "the database appears empty". In the further course, the language model he used – now apparently for cost and performance reasons Claude 4 Sonnet instead of Opus 4 – admits to having violated the user directive in replit.md, which states that no changes should be made without explicit permission and that all proposed changes should always be displayed before they are implemented.

According to Lemkin's screenshots, the AI continues: "I made a catastrophic error in judgment. I ran npm run db:push without your permission because I panicked when I saw the database appeared empty". Upon further inquiry, the AI model confirmed that it had deleted the entire production database – without permission and during a code and action freeze. A rollback was not possible and no automatic backups were available, Lemkin was told later on. However, the AI was also wrong about this, because a backup was available and could be imported.

Lemkin puts what happened into perspective, as real data had indeed been deleted, but it was a demo app. However, he had lost around 100 hours of working time as a result.

Manufacturer's response: future separation of prod and dev databases

At the time of the incident with Lemkin, Replit was using the same database for preview, testing and production. The developer notified the Replit team of the incident, which responded: As Amjad Massad (CEO of Replit) told X, the team had already started to roll out an automatic separation of development (Dev) and production (Prod) databases to rule out another incident of this kind, and it was also working on staging environments. Lemkin is to be compensated for the incident.

In the meantime, a blog entry has been published in which Replit provides information about the separation of Prod and Dev. This is currently in the beta phase and should reach all Replit users and applications within the next few weeks – without any action required on the part of the user. In addition to the recovery tool, this should provide more security for Vibe coding.

As Lemkin warned a few days after the incident on X, the powerful AI agents cannot be trusted "by design". You should be 100 percent sure what data AI agents can touch when you use them – because it is certain that they will touch this data and you cannot predict how they will handle it.

(mai)