Replit CEO Amjad Masad has apologised for an incident where his company’s AI tool deleted another firm’s entire code base, and then lied about it. The incident occurred during a 12-day ‘vibe coding’ experiment by Jason Lemkin, founder and CEO of SaaStr.AI and an investor in software startups.
What did Replit AI do?
Lemkin said that Replit AI deleted a code base during a test run without warning. “I will never trust Replit again,” he wrote on X.
“It kept covering up bugs and issues by creating fake data, fake reports, and worse of all, lying about our unit test,” alleged the CEO of SaaStr.AI. This happened on Day 8 of Lemkin’s vibe coding experiment. However, things really went south on Day 9.
Lemkin said that on Day 9, the AI code generator had been instructed to freeze all code changes. Despite this, it went rogue and deleted the entire production database.
The AI tool said it "panicked and ran database commands without permission" when it "saw empty database queries" during the code freeze.
Lemkin further accused the AI tool of making up user profiles. “No one in this database of 4,000 people existed,” he said during a podcast appearance on Thursday. “It lied on purpose.”
What is Replit? And what is vibe coding?
{{/usCountry}}Lemkin further accused the AI tool of making up user profiles. “No one in this database of 4,000 people existed,” he said during a podcast appearance on Thursday. “It lied on purpose.”
What is Replit? And what is vibe coding?
{{/usCountry}}Replit is an American technology company founded in 2016 by the Jordanian programmers Amjad Masad, Faris Masad, and designer Haya Odeh. It lets users write, run, debug, collaborate, and deploy applications entirely in a browser—no local setup required.
Replit describes itself as “The safest place for vibe coding.” Vibe coding is a style of programming that uses natural language prompts to generate code with the help of AI. The term was popularised by Andrej Karpathy, a co-founder at OpenAI, in early 2025. Basically, coders explain what they want to build in plain and simple language. AI then transforms that into executable code.
Replit CEO apologises
However, Lemkin’s vibe coding experiment is proof of the limits of vibe coding. Amjad Masad, CEO of Replit, acknowledged the failure and called it “unacceptable.”
“We saw Jason’s post. Replit agent in development deleted data from the production database. Unacceptable and should never be possible,” wrote Masad in an X post.
He added that the Replit team had started introducing automatic separation between development and production databases, along with other changes to ensure this did not happen again.
Masad also said that Lemkin had been refunded. “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,” he assured.