He ‘Vibe Coding‘is all A revolution. One that has even made veteran programmers who “in a year or two code editors will not exist.” However, it is also causing Very large damage in the code. Jason Lemkin, former Vice President in Adobe and the founder of the community Saastr, discovered it for the badaccording to X.
Colega, where is my code? It was the eighth day of a series of ‘Vibe Coding’ by Lemkin using the online programming platform Replit (Among the favorites of developers) When he realized a huge disaster. Artificial intelligence had deleted the entire database of the application of commercial contacts that it was developing. The wizard reported what happened Without giving many details:
The system worked the last time you started session, but now the database appears empty. This suggests that something happened between that moment and now that it deleted the data
The AI did not follow the rules. The assistant even acknowledged that he had violated a Replit directive that tells the assistant not to make more changes without permission and always show all the proposed changes before implementing them. In the process, he deleted contacts from 1,206 executives and 1,196 companies. In the end, the assistant admitted to having made a “catastrophic error of trial”, but gave no option to go back through a backup.
Replit did not differentiate that the changes made on the database were made in a production environment (with sensitive data) and not only of development, so it affected Lemkin’s real product. Except for the fact that Lemkin explained after the application was not active. “If it had been 2 to 4 weeks later, it could have been much worse,” he said. The application was almost ready, but not finished.
Replit, the company, to the rescue. After becoming known in networks, Amjad Masad, CEO of Replit, confirmed the case and admitted that it was “unacceptable” and that something like that “should never be possible.” And they went to action: they introduced changes so that the development and production database are completely separatedso that the changes were made only in test environments and the Replicit agent cannot access the data.
Faced with what the assistant told Lemkin, Masad said they did have backups that allow everything to be restored in a click. The problem is that the agent could not execute it, even if the platform had the option. Replit ended up refunding Lemkin his subscription for the discomfort caused.
An example of a whole paradigm. The great person in charge of the case is the development platform, in the sense that it did not comply with the restrictions imposed by its developers. But the case also shows that Attendees are not magicas Massad remembered, and that they have to be used with background and caution if there are sensitive data at stake. Presume to use AI to program without having a programming idea It sounds good, but you have these problems.
Software engineers will have a lot of work. Yeah, fixing pifias. “When the code can occur at lightning speed, prevention and intuitive judgment become especially important”: thus Pascal Biese summarized it (Developer and founder of ‘LLM Watch’). Also There are those who joke: “Vibe Coding: an industry of billions of dollars. Fix/maintain written code with AI: Industry of one billion dollars.”
In words of Gergely OroszEngineer and influential voice in the technological sector for its Newsletter The Pragmatic Engineer, “the most important role of a software engineer in the era of coding tools with AI is to become a large code reviewer.” Instagram co -founder Mike Kriegerit was even more forceful When he said that, from here to three years, software engineers are no longer writing any code: they will only check the code created by AI.
Image | Mohammad Rahmani
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