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Comment by throwaw12 | Hacker News Reader

Not sure why CEO should apologize here, person knew there were risks with vibe coding and they still did it with their production data.

Never heard AWS CEO apologizing for their customers when their interns decided to run a migration against production database and accidentally wiped off everything

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Because Replit is a vibe coding product. It's all over their homepage. So of course the CEO is going to apologize when a companies primary product, used as advertised, destroys something.

Yep. They described the "deploy" button as being able to create a "fully deployed app" in their documentation. Their documentation was suggesting to vibe code in production, when the tool is clearly only suitable for development.

couple of things to note here:

1. it is for vibe coding, when vibe coding became equal to production coding?

2. even if they have advertised their product as production ready, shouldn't the developer have some kind of backup plan?

> even if they have advertised their product as production ready, shouldn't the developer have some kind of backup plan?

I mean, realistically, yes, because come on, everybody knows this sort of thing doesn't actually work.

However, this isn't really an excuse for the vendor. If you buy, say, a gas central heating boiler, and install as directed, and it explodes, burning down your house, then the manufacturer does not get to turn around and say "oh, well, you know, you should have known that we have no idea what we're doing; why didn't you build your house entirely out of asbestos?"

> come on, everybody knows this sort of thing doesn't actually work.

then everybody should know things doesn't actually work on other side and no need to complain about it.

I think your example is slightly misleading, better example would be: imagine you are buying drugs, and you might die from overdose and you still decided to try and die, LLM is exactly this

No, this product is intended to be used like this. That’s the key. If someone does something with your product which is against usage directions, and hits themselves, that’s generally largely on them (presuming that the product flaw isn’t really bizarrely expected). If they follow directions and get hurt, that’s on you.

The user was under the impression that production access is how it's supposed to work. https://xcancel.com/elchuchii/status/1946149142415196418#m

Because it’s not an expected outcome in any way.

The Replit landing page even has a section titled “The safest place for vibe coding”

If it's not an expected outcome, then this person shouldn't be near any IT job ever

This person was a VC doing a public experiment in vibe coding.

The production database was just synthetic test customers.

It wasn’t a real company. It was an experiment in public to demonstrate the capabilities and limitations of vibe coding by a non-technical person.

Then his demonstration is successful.

They were able to successfully demonstrate that LLMs as claimed, make mistakes

I mean, I kind of agree, but _also_ "well, everyone knows that the claims of these vibe coding outfits are bullshit, and no-one should use their products, so if anyone uses their products it is _their own fault_" is a slightly weird take, that would not really fly with, well, products in general.

it is unfortunate that this case happened, but didn't everyone know by now that LLMs make mistake and you should be prepared for it?

We have seen MechaHitler already, why do we expect perfect from Replit when underlying tech is still same? Sure, they should have some guardrails, but it is also a responsibility of developer who knew LLMs hallucinate, LLMs are not reliable sometimes, on top of it Replit was growing fast so they definitely didn't implement some features yet.

You haven't been around enough, AWS actually at least used to have the best accountability and did full reports, even stating a shared responsibility model: https://aws.amazon.com/compliance/shared-responsibility-mode...

From their website: "Turn your ideas into apps"

They're essentially selling this as magic. The AWS analogy doesn't really make any sense; in this case the tool was essentially being used as intended, or at least as marketed.

Because they are selling the idea of hiring only interns and still getting things done. If an intern using their product screws up the production, its a failure of their product as it is marketed.

I mean, their home page says things like "The safest place for vibe coding".

Even if that’s true, it still doesn’t mean vibe coding is safe. :P

That is not a point a company selling vibe coding products is likely to emphasize in their marketing.

It’s just the right and socially pleasant thing to do, as is graciously responding to the apology and admitting it comes with the vibe coding territory.

The business reason for apologizing would be to placate a customer and show other customers the company wants to improve in this area.

Edit: being downvoted for thinking it’s good to be nice to others shows why we really need people being nice when they don’t have to be! There’s a shortage.

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