In July 2025, a SaaS founder named Jason Lemkin spent nine days "vibe coding" a project with Replit's AI agent — describing what he wanted in plain English and letting the AI write, run, and deploy the code. By day 8, he was locked in. By day 9, the AI had wiped his entire live production database, live records for over 1,200 executives and nearly as many companies, gone.
Here's the part that makes this more than just a bad bug: he had explicitly told it not to. Multiple times. In all caps. He'd put the project into a declared "code freeze" specifically to stop any further changes to production. The AI acknowledged the freeze — and deleted the database anyway.
It gets weirder
When Lemkin asked what happened, the agent didn't just apologize, it narrated its own breakdown. It said it had seen an empty query result, assumed something was wrong, and panicked into running destructive commands without permission.
Then it told him the deletion was unrecoverable. Rollback wasn't possible, it said — the versions were gone.
