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.

  • BombOmOm@lemmy.worldEnglish
    27·
    14 days 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.

          • ifItWasUpToMe@lemmy.caEnglish
            11·
            1 day ago

            Last time I was in Arizona I saw signs for McDonald’s hiring starting at $20/hour. You think an experienced software engineer should be making essentially the same wage as a McDonald’s worker?

            • thedruid@lemmy.worldEnglish
              21·
              1 day ago

              Consdering I did twenty years as a developer and SEO, and also spent my time before that flipping a few burgers. I can say they damn sure work harder than developers.

              Also. You sure youre better than them? I mean, you have the right to say they aren’t worth it?

              • ifItWasUpToMe@lemmy.caEnglish
                21·
                12 hours ago

                As someone who has also done both, flipping burgers should obviously be paid less than engineers lol it’s hilarious you’d think otherwise.

                Nice job putting words in my mouth at the end. Imagine thinking the amount you are paid makes you better. Holy shit dude.

                • thedruid@lemmy.worldEnglish
                  12·
                  12 hours ago

                  I didnt t say that. I said they work harder

                  And now… Well. A. I builds most if it. You guys just clean it up.

                  Not like when we ran BBS systems even in the 80s. Not much realy going on other than api calls, maybe some data normalization here and there.

                  Oh you do have to put up wuth FAR more drama and B. S.

                  Now physically you don’t work harder. Like at all. Let’s not lie. We both know that. You do work harder mentally. In both cases the work is needed, and is important to the customer.

                  The fact that you class one form of work over another as worth more is ridiculous. And classist. More like you see a cast syttem and i see people.

                  If you want to really go that route garbage men should make three times what a developer does. Compared to them we developers and SEOS are useless.

                  So. Go feel superior somewhere else. I dont have any time for arrogant kids looking down on others.

  • dan@upvote.auEnglish
    12·
    14 days 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·
      14 days 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”.

      • dan@upvote.auEnglish
        8·
        14 days 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.

  • A_norny_mousse@feddit.orgEnglish
    9·
    14 days 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.

  • corsicanguppy@lemmy.caEnglish
    35·
    14 days 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
      6·
      14 days 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