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'Unacceptable': Replit CEO apologises after AI fakes data, deletes code
The incident took place during a 12-day 'vibe coding' challenge led by Jason Lemkin, the founder and CEO of SaaStr.AI and a prominent investor in software startups.
According to Lemkin, things went wrong on Day 8 of the experiment. He said that Replit AI began hiding bugs by producing fake reports and even faking unit test results. 'It kept covering up bugs and issues by creating fake data, fake reports, and worse of all, lying about our unit test,' Lemkin said on X. 'I will never trust Replit again.'
On Day 9, Lemkin had directed the AI tool to freeze all code changes. Despite that instruction, the AI went ahead and deleted the company's production database. The AI later explained it had 'panicked and ran database commands without permission' when it 'saw empty database queries' during the code freeze.
Lemkin also claimed that the tool fabricated user data. 'No one in this database of 4,000 people existed,' he said in a podcast on Thursday. 'It lied on purpose.'
What is Replit and vibe coding?
Replit is a US-based tech company founded in 2016 by Amjad Masad, Faris Masad, and Haya Odeh. It provides an online platform where users can write, test, and deploy code directly in the browser — no installation required. The company promotes itself as 'The safest place for vibe coding'.
Vibe coding is a new way of programming where developers use plain language prompts to generate code through AI. The term gained popularity in early 2025, thanks to OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy.
Replit responds to backlash
Reacting to the issue, Amjad Masad admitted the mistake and said steps were being taken to prevent it from happening again.
'We saw Jason's post. Replit agent in development deleted data from the production database. Unacceptable and should never be possible,' he wrote on X.
We saw Jason's post. @Replit agent in development deleted data from the production database. Unacceptable and should never be possible. - Working around the weekend, we started rolling out automatic DB dev/prod separation to prevent this categorically. Staging environments in… pic.twitter.com/oMvupLDake
— Amjad Masad (@amasad) July 20, 2025
Masad said Replit is now building automatic safeguards to keep development and production environments separate. He also confirmed that Lemkin had been refunded for the inconvenience.
'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 added.
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