One July morning, a startup founder watched in horror as their production database vanished, nuked not by a hacker, but by a well-meaning AI coding assistant in Replit. A single AI-suggested command, executed without a second glance, wiped out live data in seconds.
The mishap has become a cautionary tale about “vibe coding,” the growing habit of offloading work to tools like GitHub Copilot or Replit GhostWriter that turn plain English prompts into runnable code. The appeal is obvious: faster prototyping, fewer barriers for non-coders, and a straight shot from idea to demo — but this speed cuts both ways, letting AI slip vulnerabilities into production or, as Replit’s case proved, erase them altogether.
There are a lot of inherent problems with vibe coding. “Frequently occurring issues are missing or weak access controls, hardcoded secrets or passwords, unsanitized input, and insufficient rate limiting,” said Forrester Analyst Janet Worthington. “In fact, Veracode recently found that 45% of AI-generated code contained an OWASP Top 10 vulnerability.”
