Written by Steven Vaughan-Nichols, Senior Contributing Editor
July 23, 2025 at 11:31 a.m. PT

Recently, vibe coding bit Jason Lemkin, trusted advisor to SaaStr, the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) business community, in the worst possible way. The vibe program, Replit, he said, went “rogue during a code freeze and shutdown and deleted our entire database.”

In a word: Wow. Just wow.

  • A_norny_mousse@feddit.orgEnglish
    8·
    17 hours ago

    Play stupid games…

    Seriously, unsandboxed? Maybe I just don’t understand how Replit works.

    “Three and one-half days into building my latest project, I checked my Replit usage: $607.70 in additional charges beyond my $25/month Core plan. And another $200-plus yesterday alone. At this burn rate, I’ll likely be spending $8,000 a month. And you know what? I’m not even mad about it. I’m locked in. But my goal here isn’t to play around. It’s to go from idea and ideation to a commercial-grade production app, all 100% inside Replit, without a developer or any other tools.”

    JFC. Hook, line and sinker.

    edit: https://farside.link/x.com/jasonlk/status/1945539345328607312 - and then he asks a different AI what it thinks about his AI lying to him? WTF is wrong with this person?

    edit2: What a rollercoaster. Read it! Movie material. For the sake of exciting investigative journalism & uncovering deep shit, I forgive Lemkin.

    edit3:

    “Sure, Gen AI supercharges development, but it also supercharges risk. Two engineers can now churn out the same amount of insecure, unmaintainable code as 50 engineers.”

    lol

    And just to be clear, nazi tech bros and their cheerleaders are marginally more responsible here, for propagating lie after lie after lie.

  • BombOmOm@lemmy.worldEnglish
    26·
    1 day ago

    I’ll likely be spending $8,000 a month

    You can hire an actual programmer for that kind of money. Someone with years of experience who knows what they are doing.

  • danAEnglish
    14·
    23 hours ago

    The funny part is that Replit has billboard ads along the 101 in Silicon Valley that say “vibe code, safely”

    I didn’t realise repl.it has pivoted to vibe coding. It used to be similar to CodeSandbox or jsfiddle - a sandbox for writing and running code.

    • scytale@piefed.zipEnglish
      3·
      22 hours ago

      A lot of have pivoted. When I attend conferences, most of the vendor sponsors are basically “this same product that provides this common service, but with AI integration”.

      • danAEnglish
        8·
        21 hours ago

        And probably 90% of them are just building on top of OpenAI’s API rather than having their own model, and OpenAI still don’t know how to become profitable. It feels like the dot com bubble all over again.

  • corsicanguppy@lemmy.caEnglish
    34·
    23 hours ago

    shutdown

    Hey SJVN! When you see someone making an obvious spelling mistake, you use [sic] to show you’re leaving the mistake as-is.

    Thanks!

    • Aatube@kbin.melroy.org
      5·
      23 hours ago

      there’s no spelling mistake here. whether or not you agree it can be a verb (probably not), “shutdown” definitely can be a noun. it’s not that AI shut it down, it’s that this happened during the shutdown