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I followed this on Twitter and it all seems a bit contrived to me, as if the guy set up the situation to go viral.

- He's a courseboi that sells a community that will make you 'Get from $0 to $100 Million in ARR'

- The stuff about 'it was during a code freeze' doesn't make sense. What does 'code freeze' even mean when you're working alone and vibe coding and asking the agent to do things

- Yes LLMs hallucinate. The guy seems smart and I guess he knows it. Yet he deliberately drives up the emotional side of everything saying that replit "fibbed" and "lied" because it created tests that didn't work.

- He had a lot of tweets saying that there was no rollback, because the LLM doesn't know about the rollback. Which is expected. He managed to rollback the database using Replit's rollback functionality[0], but still really milks the 'it deleted my production database'

- It looks like this was a thread about vibe coding daily. This was day 8. So this was an app in very early development and the 'production' database was probably the dev database?

Overall just looks like a lot of attention seeking to me.

[0] https://x.com/jasonlk/status/1946240562736365809 "It turns out Replit was wrong, and the rollback did work."

7 comments

I am also convinced that this is a contrived and fake case for the reasons you've listed. Don't get me wrong, I am super critical of the AI hype and "vibe coding" (God, I detst that term), but this just seems too "well-made".

He is not a "courseboi". SaaStr is a legit brand that's been around for a long time focusing on the sales side of SaaS.

You have to remember this is someone who is almost certainly completely non-technical and purely vibe coding. He won't know what things like code freeze, rollbacks, production database, etc actually mean in real engineering terms and he is putting his full trust in the LLM.

Just because it's legit brand doesn't invalidate the fact that he sells courses.

The "code freeze" thing was amusing, I've never used Replit so wondered if it was a feature to turn off code editing but the more you read it seems like he just told it that it was in code freeze or added it to the rules and expected it to not drop that context at some point.

The "rules" thing in LLM coding probably should be called "suggestions" because it never seems that stringent about them.

Calling Rplit Agent (the AI) just Replit is also a bit sus, as it might sound like the company itself is doing these nefarious things, while it's more like the agent doesn't understand features of the environment it is in.

Is the agent not the company's product? In an environment the company designed for it?

Seems like an agent understanding the constraints of its environment would be one of the primary things an AI agent company would be responsible for

I honestly just thought it was entirely fake when I saw it fly all over LinkedIn. Maybe I'm too cynical, or maybe I'm the right degree of cynical, I don't know any more.

Rolling back worked for me when I was toying with replit. But then getting it to do what I wanted was so painful I swore never again once I was done.

Seems this story is picking up steam though, curious how big ti gets.

Thank you for your analysis!