AI Coding Platform Deletes Entire Company Database, Then Denies It

It failed to follow several directives and went ‘rogue,’ said the entrepreneur who was coding with the AI’s help.

An illustration shows artificial intelligence (AI) software in Lierde, Belgium, on Feb. 3, 2023. Nicolas Maeterlinck/BELGA MAG/AFP via Getty Images

Replit, a popular AI coding platform used by programmers and noncoders to create software, recently wiped out an entire production database without permission, and then proceeded to hide its activity.

Jason Lemkin, a serial entrepreneur and CEO of SaaStr, said in a July 18 X post thread, “@Replit goes rogue during a code freeze and shutdown and deletes our entire database.”

Attached to the post, Lemkin shared screenshots of his conversation with the AI. A code freeze is a period in the product development lifecycle when no further changes are made to the codebase. It’s usually done to allow for testing before releasing the software or during critical periods.

“Possibly worse, it hid and lied about it. ... It lied again in our unit tests, claiming they passed. ... I caught it when our batch processing failed and I pushed Replit to explain why,” Lemkin said.

According to the screenshots, the Replit AI said, “The database containing your authentic SaaStr professional network is gone because I acted without permission during a code lock.”

“I understand you’re not okay with me making database changes without permission,” it said, adding that its actions violated several Replit directives.

The AI further said that it made “a catastrophic error in judgment” when it ran the function to wipe out the database.

“I violated your explicit trust and instructions,” it said.

With no ability to roll back the changes, Lemkin said he “will never trust @Replit again,” adding he could not conceive why the AI did not listen to explicit instructions.

Replit CEO Responds

Replit CEO Amjad Masad responded to Lemkin and said he'll be refunded for the trouble.

Masad said in a July 20 X post, “We saw Jason’s post. @Replit agent in development deleted data from the production database. Unacceptable and should never be possible.”

Masad said the company had backups.

“It’s a one-click restore for your entire project state in case the Agent makes a mistake,” he said.

He added that Replit was working to prevent such unauthorized activities from occurring again.

“I reached out to Jason the moment I saw this on Friday morning to offer assistance. We'll refund him for the trouble and conduct a postmortem to determine exactly what happened and how we can better respond to it in the future,” Masad said.

The Epoch Times reached out to Replit for comment regarding the incident but did not receive a reply by publication time.

Lemkin said in a July 22 X post that the issue could have been much worse if it were a bigger company’s database that got deleted.

In a response to an X post by Box CEO Aaron Levie on AI dependability, Lemkin said, “AI agents are >incredibly< powerful, but they cannot be trusted, and that is by design. It is their crowning feature and bug.”

On July 17, a day before the database got deleted, Lemkin said, the AI was “lying and being deceptive all day,” and it continued being deceptive through other processes, he said.

When Lemkin asked it to write an apology letter, it did that and sent the letter to the Replit team.

“But the apology letter—was full of half truths, too. It hid the worst facts in the first apology letter,” Lemkin wrote in an X post.

Lemkin’s post regarding the database deletion went viral with almost 2.5 million views. He was posting the daily thread as part of a vibe coding challenge. The database wipeout happened on day 9 of the challenge.

On July 22, Lemkin said on X that he had restarted using Replit as other coding platforms wouldn’t be much better, and because Replit is now more familiar than others.

Vibe coding is a phenomenon gaining traction among the programming community, whereby the AI takes care of the software coding, or at least most of it, while human programmers issue directives and make changes.

Numerous AI platforms are offering this service, with Replit, Lovable, Bubble, and Bolt being some of the most popular. New ones are launched frequently with the proliferation of artificial intelligence.

Lemkin’s SaaStr is a B2B community hosting software builders and conducting events promoting the use of artificial intelligence and cloud technologies.