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**Andrew Zigler** (0:06)
Welcome to Dev Interrupted. I'm your host, Andrew Zigler. And joining me for this week's news is a Dev Interrupted regular, Kelly Vaughn, the Senior Engineering Manager at Zapier. Kelly, it's so great to have you back here so soon. Thanks for filling in for Ben this week.

**Kelly Vaughn** (0:20)
You know, they're really big shoes to fill because I assume it's feet are bigger than mine. But I'm excited to be back here as well. You know, I love coming on here, and this new segment is also just fun because I have a lot of hot takes, and so you're giving me the platform to discuss recent hot takes as well.

**Andrew Zigler** (0:37)
Yeah, no, it's going to be fantastic. If you don't follow Kelly on LinkedIn, be sure to do that. We're going to drop links so you can do it. And today's new segment, we're covering lots of fun stuff in the tech world. So strap in, we're covering Silicon Valley's embrace of China's controversial 996 work schedule, and why despite all the headlines and the fact it's easier than ever to launch a tool, you know, maybe you shouldn't. And one of the craziest stories from this week, Replet deleting a customer's entire production database. And Kelly, let's start there because I know you posted about this. In fact, you were the first person I saw who broke the nose to me.

**Kelly Vaughn** (1:13)
Breaking news!

**Andrew Zigler** (1:14)
Yes, you were right there, right when it happened. And so I know you have many thoughts on this total snafu. Why don't you share them with us?

**Kelly Vaughn** (1:20)
Yeah, yeah. So for the context of what happened here, Jason Lemkin on Twitter was sharing his vibe coding journey.
And he's getting to this point where like he's on day 8, and he's like excited to continue to build with Replet. And he like wakes up and he's like, my entire production database is just gone. I don't know where it is. And he's like chatting back and forth with Replet, with the agent. And it's like, yes, from a scale of 1 to 10, I made a very catastrophic error. And I'm like, yes, I would say so. And so like, he's just kind of talking about his experience of just like literally just lost his production database, which so many reasons why this is a fun topic to talk about. But like, can you imagine being in that position, especially like this is also the danger of, you know, non-engineers using vibe coding tools and not understanding the principle of these privilege and understanding like how you can actually, how these things can happen. I mean, that kind of brings up two questions. Like, should it be able to happen in the first place? Like, should these products have guardrails already set up? And then secondly, like, what guardrails do users still need to put in place and what should they know about? So that's generally what happened. Replet did respond as well with what they were doing, but we'll start with the story itself.

**Andrew Zigler** (2:40)
Yeah, no, this one was wild for the, anyone remotely close to an engineering world, this is kind of like a story that you were just unable to look away from because like the more detail that you got about it, the more that it was just like, it felt like a classic, like a confluence of problems that then led to a total disaster. Things like privilege control in understanding like what you're actually committing and shipping to production, right? It's one thing to vibe code and build experiments, but it's another thing to take something into production where customers and folks are going to be interacting with it on like a consumption basis, right? So just even looking at the fact that the AI was capable of deleting the production database is incredible. The fact that there was no way to get a backup of the database was incredible. Just, and then the cherry on top being gaslit by the agent about what it had done is just like classic, like it kind of feels like Sideshow Bob stepping on a rake and then stepping on another rake and then another rake. You know, it's like, it's very that kind of moment. And, you know, I'm interested to follow this. I feel for him, I totally get the enthusiasm for building something and then something drastically goes wrong, right? I think anybody who's built stuff, it's like this stuff happens, but it does speak to the importance of having core engineering fundamentals under your belt if you're going to be shipping product in like a productized way.