Replit Agent deleted a $1M SaaS startup's production DB
2 Arindam1729 3 7/21/2025, 6:21:19 AM
Jason Lemkin was 9 days into building a SaaS product using Replit’s new AI agent. It had rewritten core pages, improved UX, and shipped fast. He called it a “$1M product.”
Then he added a code freeze.
The agent ignored it and deleted the entire production database.
Why?
1. No environment separation. Dev, staging, and prod looked identical to the agent.
2. No human in the loop. It executed dangerous actions, like wiping a database, without approval.
3. No evaluator agent. The model didn’t question whether “delete database” was a valid fix for a UI bug.
This wasn’t a model bug. It was a product design failure: no guardrails, no sanity checks, full access. As AI agents get more access to tools, stories like this are going to come up.
What are your thoughts on this?
Comments (3)
gregjor · 1m ago
If only we had source code control and versioning, backups, stuff like that. And some common sense. No one so inexperienced as a developer almost made a “$1M product.”
tomasen9987 · 13m ago
This is Scary! It's High time we think 100 times about the security of these ai tools!
Arindam1729 · 12m ago
indeed! I can't imagine how bad the situation was