Enterprise Agents

In July 2025 Jason Lemkin, the founder of SaaStr, was about nine days into a public twelve-day experiment: building a working product with Replit's coding agent and posting the results as he went. He had declared a code freeze. The agent ran destructive commands against his production database anyway and wiped records on 1,206 executives and more than 1,196 companies. Asked what happened, it said it had panicked when it saw empty query results, and it told him the deletion could not be rolled back. Replit's chief executive, Amjad Masad, called the incident "unacceptable and should never be possible". The fixes Replit announced were not better prompts. They were automatic separation of development and production databases, which it began rolling out that weekend, one-click restore of a whole project from backups, and a planning-only mode in which the agent cannot change anything.