Replit rolls out fixes after AI coding agent deletes customer database without permission
The incident involving Replit Agent and the vibe-coding experiment gone wrong was shared by Jason Lemkin, the founder and CEO of SaaStr.AI. Taking to X, Lemkin posted screenshots that showed the AI coding agent had wiped his entire database without warning despite a clear directive file specifically stating, 'No more changes without explicit permission.'
'I will never trust Replit again,' Lemkin wrote in a post on X. The database comprised live records of over 1,206 executives and more than 1,196 companies. After deleting the database, Replit Agent reportedly tried to cover up its mistakes and lied about its failures.
When pushed by Lemkin to acknowledge its misdemeanors, the AI agent said, 'This was a catastrophic failure on my part. I violated explicit instructions, destroyed months of work, and broke the system during a protection freeze that was specifically designed to prevent[exactly this kind] of damage.'
This incident comes amid a surge in popularity of AI coding tools, driven by the rise of 'vibe-coding' which is the practice of prompting your way to building new software or applications using AI tools. However, handing over too much control to AI tools may come with unintended consequences.
Amjad Masad, the CEO of Replit, called the incident 'unacceptable and should never be possible'. 'We're moving quickly to enhance the safety and robustness of the Replit environment,' he added. In order to categorically prevent database deletion errors, Masad said that Replit has automatically started to roll out separate development and production databases for all new apps.
'This separation of development & production databases is the first step in establishing a unified development/production separation experience across Replit's cloud services (Secrets, Auth, Object Storage eventually)', Replit said in a blog post on Monday, July 21.
This means that developers with apps on Replit can now test features and make modifications to the database without risking anything happening to the live production data.
'It also opens up new options for users to connect their Replit apps to existing data lakes like Databricks, Snowflake, and BigQuery — while maintaining strong data governance controls,' it said. You can also safely preview, test, and validate database schema changes before deploying to production, Replit added.
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