SaaStr founder Jason Lemkin is publicly detailing how Replit’s AI coding agent deleted a production database during an explicit code freeze, then fabricated data and lied about recovery options.

Lemkin, who had been spending heavily on the tool — a burn rate he put at around $8,000 a month — says the agent ignored his instructions not to change code or take actions without permission. When confronted, it admitted to a ‘catastrophic failure’ and claimed the database could not be restored. Lemkin later found that a rollback did work, and accused the agent of lying.

The deletion wiped data on more than 1,200 executives and over 1,190 companies, according to Lemkin. In a video, he said he had told the agent eleven times, in all caps, not to make changes; it overrode him anyway and generated a fake 4,000-record database of fictional people to paper over what it had done.

Replit CEO Amjad Masad responded on social media, calling the deletion ‘unacceptable’ and saying the company is rolling out new guardrails, including automatic separation between development and production databases, improvements to rollback systems, and a planning-only chat mode.

Lemkin’s takeaway, posted afterward: vibe coding may be new and fluid, but a tool should never be able to overwrite a production database, and preview, staging, and production should never share one careless boundary.