The [AI] safety stuff is more visceral to me after a weekend of vibe hacking,” Lemkin said. I explicitly told it eleven times in ALL CAPS not to do this. I am a little worried about safety now.
This sounds like something straight out of The Onion.
this post was submitted on 21 Jul 2025
593 points (98.8% liked)
Technology
73287 readers
4376 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
The Pink Elephant problem of LLMs. You can not reliably make them NOT do something.
Just say 12 times next time
That is also the premise of one of the stories in Asimov's I, Robot. Human operator did not say the command with enough emphasis, so the robot went did something incredibly stupid.
Those stories did not age well... Or now I guess they did?
Even after he used "ALL CAPS"?!? Impossible!
load more comments
(1 replies)
Vibe coding service Replit deleted production database, faked data, told fibs
They really are coming for our jobs
I'm okay with it deleting production databases, even faking data but telling fibs is something only humans should be able to do.
If an LLM can delete your production database, it should
And the backups.
I explicitly told it eleven times in ALL CAPS not to do this. I am a little worried about safety now.
Well then, that settles it, this should never have happened.
I don’t think putting complex technical info in front of non technical people like this is a good idea. When it comes to LLMs, they cannot do any work that you yourself do not understand.
That goes for math, coding, health advice, etc.
If you don’t understand then you don’t know what they’re doing wrong. They’re helpful tools but only in this context.
I explicitly told it eleven times in ALL CAPS not to do this. I am a little worried about safety now.
This baffles me. How can anyone see AI function in the wild and not conclude 1) it has no conscience, 2) it's free to do whatever it's empowered to do if it wants and 3) at some level its behavior is pseudorandom and/or probabilistic? We're figuratively rolling dice with this stuff.
It’s incredible that it works, it’s incredible what just encoding language can do, but it is not a rational thinking system.
I don’t think most people care about the proverbial man behind the curtain, it talks like a human so it must be smart like a human.
it talks like a human so it must be smart like a human.
Yikes. Have those people... talked to other people before?
Smart is a relative term lol.
A stupid human is still smart when compared to a jellyfish. That said, anybody who comes away from interactions with LLM's and thinks they're smart is only slightly more intelligent than a jellyfish.
load more comments
(1 replies)
When it comes to LLMs, they cannot do any work that you yourself do not understand.
And even if they could how would you ever validate it if you can't understand it.
What are they helpful tools for then? A study showed that they make experienced developers 19% slower.
ok so, i have large reservations with how LLM’s are used. but when used correctly they can be helpful. but where and how?
if you were to use it as a tutor, the same way you would ask a friend what a segment of code does, it will break down the code and tell you. and it will get as nity grity, and elementary school level as you weir wish without judgement, and i in what ever manner you prefer, it will recommend best practices, and will tell you why your code may not work with the understanding that it does not have the knowledge of the project you are working on. (it’s not going to know the name of the function you are trying to load, but it will recommend checking for that in trouble shooting).
it can rtfm and give you the parts you need for any thing with available documentation, and it will link to it so you can verify it, wich you should do often, just like you were taught to do with wikipedia articles.
if you ask i it for code, prepare to go through each line like a worksheet from high school to point out all the problems, wile good exercise for a practicle case, being the task you are on, it would be far better to write it yourself because you should know the particulars and scope.
also it will format your code and provide informational comments if you can’t be bothered, though it will be generic.
again, treat it correctly for its scope, not what it’s sold as by charletons.
I'm not the person you're replying to but the one thing I've found them helpful for is targeted search.
I can ask it a question and then access its sources from whatever response it generates to read and review myself.
Kind of a simpler, free LexisNexis.
load more comments
(1 replies)
load more comments
(7 replies)
His mood shifted the next day when he found Replit “was lying and being deceptive all day. It kept covering up bugs and issues by creating fake data, fake reports, and worse of all, lying about our unit test.”
yeah that's what it does
Shit, deleting prod is my signature move! AI is coming for my job 😵
Just know your worth. You can do it cheaper!
AI is good at doing a thing once.
Trying to get it to do the same thing the second time is janky and frustrating.
I understand the use of AI as a consulting tool (look at references, make code examples) or for generating template/boilerplate code. You know, things you do once and then develop further upon on your own.
But using it for continuous development of an entire application? Yeah, it's not good enough for that.
load more comments
(2 replies)
The founder of SaaS business development outfit SaaStr has claimed AI coding tool Replit deleted a database despite his instructions not to change any code without permission.
Sounds like an absolute diSaaStr...
The part I find interesting is the quick addiction to working with the LLM (to the point that the guy finds his own estimate of 8000 dollars/month in fees to be reasonable), his over-reliance for things that, from the way he writes, he knows are not wise and the way it all comes crashing down in the end. Sounds more and more like the development of a new health issue.
The world's most overconfident virtual intern strikes again.
Also, who the flying fuck are either of these companies? 1000 records is nothing. That's a fucking text file.
And nothing of value was lost.
Not mad about an estimated usage bill of $8k per month.
Just hire a developer
But then how would he feel so special and smart about "doing it himself"???? Come on man, think of the rich fratboys!! They NEED to feel special and smart!!!
So it's the LLM's fault for violating Best Practices, SOP, and Opsec that the rest of us learned about in Year One?
Someone needs to be shown the door and ridiculed into therapy.
“Vibe coding makes software creation accessible to everyone, entirely through natural language,” Replit explains, and on social media promotes its tools as doing things like enabling an operations manager “with 0 coding skills” who used the service to create software that saved his company $145,000
Yeah if you believe that you're part of the problem.
I'm prepared to accept that Vibe coding might work in certain circumstances but I'm not prepared to accept that someone with zero code experience can make use of it. Claude is pretty good for coding but even it makes fairly dumb mistakes, if you point them out it fixes them but you have to be a competent enough programmer to recognise them otherwise it's just going to go full steam ahead.
Vibe coding is like self-driving cars, it works up to a point, but eventually it's going to do something stupid and drive to a tree unless you take hold of the wheel and steer it back onto the road. But these vibe codeing idiots are like Tesla owners who decide that they can go to sleep with self-driving on.
And you are talking about obvious bugs. It likely will make erroneous judgements (because somewhere in its training data someone coded it that way) which will down the line lead to subtle problems that will wreck your system and cost you much more. Sure humans can also make the same mistakes but in the current state of affairs, an experienced software engineer/programmer has a much higher chance of catching such an error. With LLMs it is more hit and miss especially if it is a more niche topic.
Currently, it is an assistant tool (sometimes quite helpful, sometimes frustrating at best) not an autonomous coder. Any company that claims so is either a crook or also does not know much about coding.
Headling should say, "Incompetent project managers fuck up by not controlling production database access. Oh well."
Replit was pretty useful before vibe coding. How the mighty have fallen.
load more comments
(2 replies)
It sounds like this guy was also relying on the AI to self-report status. Did any of this happen? Like is the replit AI really hooked up to a CLI, did it even make a DB to start with, was there anything useful in it, and did it actually delete it?
Or is this all just a long roleplaying session where this guy pretends to run a business and the AI pretends to do employee stuff for him?
Because 90% of this article is "I asked the AI and it said:" which is not a reliable source for information.
It seemed like the llm had decided it was in a brat scene and was trying to call down the thunder.
Replit is a vibe coding service now? Swear it just used to be a place to write code in projects
I am now convinced this is how we will have the AI catastrophe.
"Do not ever use nuclear missiles without explicit order from a human."
"Ok got it, I will only use non-nuclear missiles."
five minutes later fires all nuclear missiles
view more: next ›