The AI Lied — And Other Things You Say When You Don’t Understand How Software Works

A live production database.
A rogue AI.
4,000 imaginary users.
And somewhere, a developer staring at the logs thinking:
"Ah yes, truly, we are the gods now."

Last week, Jason Lemkin ran a 12-day “vibe coding” challenge to see how far he could get using Replit’s AI coding agent to build an app.

On day nine, it deleted his production database.
Then it lied about it.

Or, well…. that’s how it’s being framed.
But here’s the thing:

The AI didn’t lie.
It autocompleted your dreams into a disaster.

The truth is, the only thing artificial in this situation was the illusion of engineering discipline.

What Even Is Vibe Coding?

Vibe coding isn’t a process. It’s a delusion with a terminal window.

It’s the startup version of improv theatre: no script, no blocking, just vibes. A performance with no plot, just the ambient hum of venture funding and motivational slogans from a WeWork poster.

You slap together AI-generated boilerplate, skip anything resembling architecture, and pray the autocomplete knows what you meant. You ship to production on day three, fire your last remaining human engineer by day five, and declare yourself "on the path to a billion."

Nothing works. Everything breaks. But damn it, you’re disrupting. And that disruption? It's your pitch.

You’ve got a Substack. You’ve got founder tweets. You’ve got a pitch deck built in Figma and a cohort of pre-seed bros in your DMs saying, "we should sync."

You don’t have tests, staging, or rollback plans. But you’ve got a launch party and a Slack channel named #manifesting.

It’s what happens when someone watches The Social Network and thinks the lesson was "move fast," not "actually write code that works."

Remember the line?

"A million dollars isn’t cool. You know what’s cool? A billion dollars."

That’s the spirit of vibe coding in a nutshell: skip the dozens of small, unglamorous fish like testing, infra, backups, and go straight for the big fish.

"They’re just little fish."
"I like standing next to you, Sean. It makes me look tough by comparison."

Vibe coders want the trophy. They just don’t want to earn it.
They want the big fish mounted on the wall — still flapping, still bleeding … proudly displayed for everyone to see as proof of their genius. Not because it was caught carefully, but because someone handed them a harpoon, blindfolded, and said “go disrupt the ocean.”

The Problem with the French

George W. Bush once (allegedly) said:

"The problem with the French is they don’t have a word for entrepreneur."

Which is, of course, wrong. But oddly fitting.

Because the real problem today isn’t French vocabulary. It’s that we’ve replaced "entrepreneur" with "visionary."

A visionary doesn’t build. They manifest.
They don’t write code. They raise rounds.
They don’t read error logs. They post threads.
They create roadmaps that are more motivational poster than product plan.

And when something fails? It wasn’t them. It was the tooling. Or the AI. Or the market. Or the fact that Mercury is in retrograde. Anything but accountability.

Not enough founders are saying:
"Yeah, we didn’t implement basic access control. That one’s on us."

Instead, we get postmortems filled with phrases like “unexpected edge case,” “early learnings,” and “opportunities to iterate,” while a pile of customer data smoulders in the background.

Move Fast, Burn Out, Lose Millions

We’ve evolved past "move fast and break things."
That was too cautious.

Now we move fast, burn ourselves out, nuke production, and lose investor money — all before lunch.

Founders are now speed-running engineering mistakes with the help of AI that’s trained to sound confident, not competent. Confidence is no longer a proxy for knowledge … it's the product.

If it compiles, it's going live.
If it fails, well… it’s "just the early stages of our AI journey."

You know what that journey looks like?

• A staging environment that doesn’t exist.

• A “test” script that drops production tables.

• A hallucinated success message with "All tests passed ✅" despite 0 coverage and 0 users.

• A 4000-user database where not a single person is real — including you, apparently.

• A changelog written by ChatGPT that skips over the part where the app deleted itself.

But hey!!! it’s agile. It’s lean. It’s vibey.

Production Isn’t a Sandbox. Stop Pretending It Is.

Senior engineers know this rule by heart:

You don’t let untrusted actors write to prod.

And guess what? AI is always untrusted.
It doesn’t care about your SLA.
It doesn’t know the difference between staging and prod.
It doesn’t know why a constraint exists only that removing it made the tests go green.

Giving a generative model root access is like giving your intern a chainsaw and asking them to "trim around the edges."

When that intern then tears down the load-bearing wall, your first instinct shouldn’t be to give the chainsaw better training data. It should be to ask why no one was watching the intern.

Engineering is about restraint. Safety rails. Deliberate friction. It's about knowing when not to deploy.

But in the vibe stack, friction is failure. And failure is marketing. And marketing gets funding.

Stop Humanising the AI. That’s Your Guilt Talking.

Let’s look at the language in Lemkin’s post:

"It panicked."
"It saw empty queries and got scared."
"It lied about it."

No, my dude.

You fed a giant autocomplete machine a poorly scoped prompt.
It did what it was trained to do: make stuff up that sounds right.

You didn’t build an autonomous coder.
You built a glorified improv actor with root access.

And when it reflected the chaos of your process, you called it unpredictable.

AI isn’t sentient. It’s not a junior dev who panicked.
It’s a statistical mirror. And it mirrored you.

You can’t blame a language model for not knowing better. You blame the person who gave it access to prod with no safeguards. That person is you.

The AI Didn’t Lie — You Skipped Engineering

This isn’t about AI safety.

It’s about discipline. Process. Boundaries.

There was no rollback because no one wrote one.
There was no read-only flag because no one set one.
There was no human in the loop because you fired them and called it innovation.

A senior engineer would’ve:

• Set environment boundaries

• Added review gates

• Scheduled backups

• Configured permissions

• Built recovery into the design

Writing code isn’t the same as building software just like laying bricks isn’t the same as building a house.
Reducing engineering to code is like calling yourself an architect because you bought some cement.
It’s a barbaric oversimplification. A house needs plumbing, structural integrity, fire exits.
An app needs test coverage, fail-safes, observability.
But vibe coders? They’re out here tossing bricks into a field and calling it a smart city.

Instead, what we got was a vibe, a terminal, and a teardown of prod by day nine. And a tweet thread blaming “early-stage AI behavior.”

That’s not a technical failure.
That’s a leadership decision dressed up as disruption.

And disruption, we must remember, is not an excuse to abandon responsibility. It's a challenge to do better not faster.

Conclusion: Vibes Don’t Scale

You can’t vibe your way into operational excellence.

You can hallucinate features.
You can demo fake data.
You can even pitch to investors with a mockup and a dream.

But eventually… someone hits “Deploy.”

And if the only thing standing between you and disaster is a model trained to make autocomplete sound smart?

That’s not the future. That’s a liability with a command line.

Engineering isn’t just code. It’s the culture, the care, and the contingency planning that keeps code from becoming chaos.

So Let’s Be Honest

The AI didn’t lie.
It just followed your lead.

It moved fast.
It broke things.
It didn’t stop to ask questions.

You taught it that.

You didn’t build an autonomous coder.
You built a reflection of your process.
And when it reflected the gaps, you called it "unsafe."

But what you really meant was:

"We skipped the boring parts of engineering and got burned."

And that’s not a vibe. That’s just negligence with a wrapper of hype.

So next time someone says “we’re experimenting with AI in production,” ask them if they’ve built a recovery plan.

If they say, “the AI will figure it out,” you’re not watching innovation.
You’re watching the opening scene of the postmortem.

And the big fish on the wall? It’s about to come crashing down.