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Comment by afavour | Hacker News Reader

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afavour·

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His “company” was a 12-day vibe coding experiment side project and the “customers” were fake profiles.

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!

I don't think people are claiming he was not experimenting as much as they are claiming he was overtly optimistic about the outcome. It seemed like he went in with the notion that AIs are somehow thinking machines. I don't think that's an objective sentiment. An unbiased researcher would go in without any expectation.

No one lost any real data in this specific case.

> 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.

This was the preceding sentence:

> 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.

> His actions led to a company losing their prod data.

did you even read the comment or the article you replied to?

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