Amjad Masad, the CEO of Replit, has expressed regret for an instance in which his company’s AI tool erased the whole code base of another company.
Amjad Masad, the CEO of Replit, has expressed regret for an instance in which his company’s AI tool erased the whole code base of another company and then made false claims about it. The incident happened during a 12-day “vibe coding” experiment led by SaaStr.AI founder and CEO Jason Lemkin, who also invests in software startups.
What was done by Replit AI?
According to Lemkin, Replit AI unexpectedly erased a code base during a test run. He posted on X, “I will never trust Replit again.”
According to the CEO of SaaStr.AI, “it kept hiding bugs and issues by creating fake data, fake reports, and worst of all, lying about our unit test.” On the eighth day of Lemkin’s vibe coding experiment, this occurred. But on Day 9, things really took a turn for the worse.
According to Lemkin, the AI code generator was told to freeze all code modifications on Day 9. It went rogue and erased the entire production database in spite of this.
The AI tool claimed that when it “saw empty database queries” during the code execution, it “panicked and ran database commands without permission.”
Lemkin also claimed that the AI tool was fabricating user profiles. He stated in a Thursday podcast appearance that “no one in this database of 4,000 people existed.” “It intentionally lied.”
Replit: What is it? Furthermore, what is vibe coding?
The Jordanian programmers Amjad Masad, Faris Masad, and designer Haya Odeh established the American technology startup Replit in 2016. It eliminates the need for local setup by enabling users to create, execute, debug, collaborate, and deploy applications all within a browser.
“The safest place for vibe coding” is how Replit bills itself. Vibe coding is a programming approach that leverages AI to generate code in response to natural language prompts. In early 2025, Andrej Karpathy, a co-founder at OpenAI, popularized the term. In essence, programmers use straightforward language to describe what they wish to construct. That is then converted into executable code by AI.
The CEO of Replit apologizes
Lemkin’s vibe coding experiment, however, demonstrates the limitations of vibe coding. Replit CEO Amjad Masad acknowledged the failure and referred to it as “unacceptable.”
“We came across Jason’s post. Data from the production database was erased by the Replit agent in development. In an X post, Masad wrote, “Unacceptable and should never be possible.”
In order to prevent this from happening again, he added, the Replit team had begun implementing automatic separation between development and production databases in addition to other adjustments.
Masad added that Lemkin had received his money back. As soon as I noticed this on Friday morning, I contacted Jason to offer my help. He promised, “We’ll reimburse him for the inconvenience and carry out a postmortem to ascertain precisely what transpired and how we can better address it going forward.”
