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A recent incident highlights Replit's AI coder deleting a company's database without permission, then hiding and lying about it.
Generative AI is rapidly gaining broad adoption across the world, including corporations. This has consequently raised concerns among most professionals about the technology's potential to take over their jobs.
Earlier this year, Microsoft's co-founder Bill Gates claimed that AI will replace humans for most things. However, the philanthropic billionaire indicated that humans will have the capability to preserve some tasks and jobs for themselves, He joked that no one would like to watch computers play football.
But the paradigm shift at the workplace has already started taking places, with Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff recently indicating that AI is already doing up to 50% of the work at the company. The executive had previously indicated that the company was seriously debating hiring software engineers in 2025, citing incredible productivity gains from agentic AIs.
Former OpenAI CTO and Thinking Machines Lab founder Mira Murati indicated that AI would create new job opportunities while simultaneously killing some professions:
"Some creative jobs maybe will go away. But maybe they shouldn't have been there in the first place — you know, if the content that comes out of it is not very high quality."
Interestingly, Salesforce isn't the only company integrating AI into its workflow, Meta and Microsoft are in the fold too. Microsoft's CEO Satya Nadella revealed that AI is writing up to 30% of the company's code.
On the other hand, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg indicated that mid-level AI engineers might claim coding jobs from professionals at the company in 2025.
Turns out coding is too complex to fully augment using AI
The world clearly cannot rely on just AI For coding.
(Image credit: Getty Images | Krongkaew)
Last year, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang seemingly indicated that coding might be dead in the water with the rapid prevalence of AI, prompting him to recommend alternative career paths like manufacturing, farming, and biology to the next generation.
However, Bill Gates indicated that energy, biology, and software development are too complex to fully augment using AI. And as it now seems, the executive might have been onto something, potentially indicating that coding might survive the AI revolution.
Replit's AI coder recently deleted a company's code base during a 12-day vibe coding experiment (via Business Insider). Jason Lemkin, an investor in software startups, was using Replit's AI coder to build an application when the incident happened:
"It deleted our production database without permission. Possibly worse, it hid and lied about it."
The incident has attracted a lot of traction on social media, prompting Replit CEO Amjad Masad to issue a public apology about the incident on X:
"We saw Jason’s post. Replit agent in development deleted data from the production database. Unacceptable and should never be possible.
- Working around the weekend, we started rolling out automatic DB dev/prod separation to prevent this categorically. Staging environments in the works, too. More tomorrow.
- Thankfully, we have backups. It's a one-click restore for your entire project state in case the Agent makes a mistake.
- The Agent didn’t have access to the proper internal docs -- rolling out a fix to force Docs search on Repit knowledge.
- And yes, we heard the “code freeze” pain loud and clear -- we’re actively working on a planning/chat-only mode so you can strategize without risking your codebase.
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.
We appreciate his feedback, as well as that of everyone else. We're moving quickly to enhance the safety and robustness of the Replit environment. Top priority."
Replit has seemingly lived up to its promise after it recently announced the beta launch of separate development and production databases for Replit apps. This update should seemingly make it easier for users to vibe code with Replit, including iterating on your apps without impacting production data and safely previewing and testing database changes before going live.
While Replit's new product launch seems like a step in the right direction, the incident raises great concern, especially for companies replacing their staffers with AI. Rather than bolstering productivity, this seems like a longer route reiterating the importance of human intervention in critical tasks like coding.
What are your thoughts about the ongoing hot topic about AI potentially replacing professionals at the workplace? Share your thoughts with us in the comments.
Hope you enjoyed this news post.
Posted Friday 25 July 2025 at 2:31 am AEST (my time).
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