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.
> Showcasing limitations of vibe coding was the point of the experiment
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".
> 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.
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.
> 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.
It's not an experiment if you're using it in production and it has the capability of destroying production data. That's not experimenting, that's just using the tool without having tested it first.
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.