No it wasn't. If you follow the threads, he went in fully believing in magical AI that you could talk to like a person.
At one point he was extremely frustrated and ready to give up. Even by day twelve he was writing things "but Replie clearly knows X, and still does X".
He did learn some invaluable lessons, but it was never an educated "experiment in the limitations of AI".
He was clearly showing that LLMs could do a lot, but still had problems.
Unfortunately from his tweets I have to agree with the grand poster that he didn’t learn this.
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Possibly worse, it hid and lied about it
It lied again in our unit tests, claiming they passed
I caught it when our batch processing failed and I pushed Replit to explain why
https://x.com/jasonlk/status/1946070323285385688
He knew
https://x.com/jasonlk/status/1946072038923530598
how could anyone on planet earth use it in production if it ignores all orders and deletes your database?
https://x.com/jasonlk/status/1946076292736221267
Ok so I'm >totally< fried from this...
But it's because destoying a production database just took it out of me.
My bond to Replie is now broken. It won't come back.
https://x.com/jasonlk/status/1946241186047676615
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Does this sound like an educated experiment into the limits of LLMs to you? Or "this magical creature lied to me and I don't know what to do"?
To his credit he did eventually learn some valuable lessons: https://x.com/jasonlk/status/1947336187527471321 see 8/13, 9/13, 10/13
> I did give [an LLM agent] access to my Google Cloud production instances and systems. And it promptly wiped a production database password and locked my network.
He got it all fixed, but the takeaway is you can't YOLO everything:
> In this case, I should have asked it to write out a detailed plan for how it was going to solve the problem, then reviewed the plan and discussed it with the AI before giving it the keys.
That's true of any kind of production deployment.
This dogpiling from people who very obviously didn’t read the article is depressing.
Testing and showing the limitations and risks of vibe coding was the point of the experiment. Giving it full control and seeing what happened was the point!
> In an episode of the "Twenty Minute VC" podcast published Thursday, he said that the AI made up entire user profiles. "No one in this database of 4,000 people existed," he said.
> That wasn't the only issue. Lemkin said on X that Replit had been "covering up bugs and issues by creating fake data, fake reports, and worst of all, lying about our unit test."
And a couple of sentences before that:
> Replit then "destroyed all production data" with live records for "1,206 executives and 1,196+ companies" and acknowledged it did so against instructions.
So I believe what you shared is simply out of context. The LLM started putting fake records into the database to hide that it deleted everything.
did you even read the comment or the article you replied to?
Lemkin was doing an experiment and Tweeting it as he went.
Showcasing limitations of vibe coding was the point of the experiment. It was not a real company. The production database had synthetic data. He was under no illusions of being a technical person. That was the point of the experiment.
It’s sad that people are dog piling Lemkin for actually putting effort into demonstrating the same exact thing that people are complaining about here: The limitations of AI coding.