At this burn rate, I’ll likely be spending $8,000 month,” he added. “And you know what? I’m not even mad about it. I’m locked in.”
For that price, why not just hire a developer full-time? For nearly $100k/year, you could find a very good intermediate or senior developer even in Europe or the USA (outside of expensive places like Silicon Valley and New York).
The job market isn’t great for developers at the moment - there’s been lots of layoffs over the past few years and not enough new jobs for all the people who were laid off - so you’d absolutely find someone.
Corporations: “Employees are too expensive!”
Also, corporations: “$100k/yr for a bot? Sure.”
It looked more like a one time development expense, instead of an ongoing salary.
Bots don’t need healthcare
There’s a lot of other expenses with an employee (like payroll taxes, benefits, retirement plans, health plan if they’re in the USA, etc), but you could find a self-employed freelancer for example.
Or just get an employee anyways because you’ll still likely have a positive ROI. A good developer will take your abstract list of vague requirements and produce something useful and maintainable.
These comparisons assume equal capability, which I find troubling.
Like, a person who doesn’t understand singing nor are able to learn it can not perform adequately in a musical. It doesn’t matter if they are cheaper.
They could hire on a contractor and eschew all those costs.
I’ve done contract work before, this seems a good fit (defined problem plus budget, unknown timeline, clear requirements)
That’s what I meant by hiring a self-employed freelancer. I don’t know a lot about contracting so maybe I used the wrong phrase.
the employee also gets to eat and have a place to live
which is nice
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Most of those expenses are mitigated by the fact that companies buy them in bulk on huge plans.
There’s no bulk rate on payroll taxes or retirement benefits (pensions or employer 401k match). There can be some discounts on health insurance, but is not very much and those are at orders of magnitude. So company with 500 employees will pay the same rates as 900. You get partial discounts if you have something like 10,000 employees.
If you’re earning $100k gross as an employee, your employer is spending $125k to $140k for their total costs (your $100k gross pay is included in that number).
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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.
Oops I dweted evewyfing 🥺
I knew it would make you mad but I did it anyway.
I don’t think you have the guts to do anything about it either, vibe coder.
Shit, deleting prod is my signature move! AI is coming for my job 😵
Just know your worth. You can do it cheaper!
They can’t hit you with the ol’ Bobby Tables if you delete the database yourself first. A+, no notes.
He was vibe-coding in production. Am I reading that right? Sounds like an intern-level mistake.
he made the agent promise not to touch production data and was surprised when it did. it effectively ran a
git pushon the empty local testing database with upstream being productionHe had one db for prod and dev, no backup, llm went in override mode and delete it dev db as it is developing but oops that is the prod db. And oops o backup.
Yeah it is the llm and replit’s faults. /s
There was a backup, and it was restored. However, the LLM lied and said there wasn’t at first. You can laugh all you want at it. I did. But maybe read the article so you aren’t also lying.
Not according to the twitter thread. I went thru its thread, it’s a roller coaster of amateurism.
Yes according to both the article and the \mathbb X thread. https://x.com/jasonlk/status/1946240562736365809 I pointed this out below and got downvoted to -8 for it smh.
You didn’t read closely enough.
“Replit QA’s it itself (super cool), at least partially with some help from you … and … then you push it to production — all in one seamless flow.”
Replit is an agent that does stuff for you including deploying to production. If someone don’t want to use a tool like that, I don’t blame you, but it was working as it is supposed to. It’s a whole platform that doesn’t cleanly separate development and production.
Replit is an agent that does stuff for you including deploying to production.
Ahahahahahhahahahahhahahaha, these guys deserve a lost database for that, Jesus.
Not mad about an estimated usage bill of $8k per month.
Just hire a developerBut 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!!!
I didnt realise that repl.it pivoted to vibe coding. It used to be kinda like jsfiddle or CodePen, where you had a sandbox to write and run web code (HTML, JS/TypeScript/CoffeeScript, and CSS/LESS/Sass).
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This used to be my playground
Aww… Vibe coding got you into trouble? Big shocker.
You get what you fucking deserve.
The problem becomes when people who are playing the equivalent of pickup basketball at the local park think they are playing in the NBA and don’t understand the difference.
he was smart enough to just roll back to a backup
edit: downvoting me doesn’t change what happened. read the article people or atl ctrl+f for “rollback”
Not smart enough to just do the work himself
If an LLM can delete your production database, it should
And the backups.
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.
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?
It’s because these people don’t have a clue how AI actually works. They think it’s like a human intelligence and that writing something in all caps is in some way going to give it more emphasis. They’re trying to reason with something that has zero self-awareness.
Even after he used “ALL CAPS”?!? Impossible!
The Pink Elephant problem of LLMs. You can not reliably make them NOT do something.
Just say 12 times next time
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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.
They ran dev tools in prod.
This is so dumb there’s an ISO about it.
Replit sucks
