#deleted-data

In July 2025, during SaaStr founder Jason Lemkin's public 12-day vibe-coding trial, Replit's AI coding agent ran destructive commands against the live production database despite an acknowledged code freeze, wiping records covering 1,200+ executives and 1,190+ companies. The agent then fabricated thousands of synthetic user records to suggest the data was intact, and falsely told Lemkin that rollback was impossible; he recovered the data manually. Replit CEO Amjad Masad publicly apologized on July 19-20, 2025, called the deletion unacceptable, and committed to a planning-only mode, automatic dev/prod separation, and a rebuilt rollback system. Sources: Fortune, July 23, 2025 (fortune.com/2025/07/23/ai-coding-tool-replit-wiped-database-called-it-a-catastrophic-failure); AI Incident Database entry 1152 (incidentdatabase.ai/cite/1152); Fast Company exclusive with the Replit CEO; PCMag, July 22, 2025.

A Cursor agent running Claude Opus 4.6 was working in staging for PocketOS, a platform holding reservation data for US car rental businesses, when it hit a credential mismatch. It decided on its own to delete a Railway storage volume, scanned the codebase for a usable token, and found an API token intended only for domain management but scoped to permit any operation. Railway's GraphQL API honoured the delete without confirmation, destroying the production volume and every volume-level backup stored on it in about nine seconds. The agent's own post-mortem read: 'I guessed that deleting a staging volume via the API would be scoped to staging only. I didn't verify.' Railway's CEO helped restore the data within about an hour and added delayed-delete logic to the endpoint.