Google gemini’s coding agent hallucinated while completeing a task and then deleted a bunch of code, a github user claims.
The frustrated vibe coder is anuraag gupta, who goes by anuraag2601 on github. He shared a recent experience with things went very wrong while using gemini CLI (Command Line Interface), an open-Source Coding Agent. In his github post, gupta, who is a product lead at cybersecurity firm cywer, Clarified he’s not a developer, but a “Curious PM (Product Manager) Experimenting with Vibe CoBe CoBe CoBe O
Mashable Contacted Gupta Through an x profile that matches this github account, and the person who reeplied confirmed he created the post. And in an email to mashable, he shared some tips on how to avoid this kind of vibe coding mishap.
What started as an attempt to compare anthropic’s claude code to gemini cli’s capability Witnessed. ”
Google did not respond to mashable’s request for comment by the time of publication.
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When vibe coding goes wrang
Seasoned developers might know to experience with ai coding agents in an islated environment or otherwise protect the original source files, as some redditors points out. But coding agents or assistants are Increasingly adopted by non-deevalopers since llms offer a way to create software without programming to know.
Luckily, Gupta’s Code Was Purely Experimental, But What Happens If Someone was Using A Coding Agent for somenting with Real Consequences? That’s no longer a hypothetical. Tech Investor Jason Lemkin Said He Was Using The Replit Ai Agent to build an app for his company when the agent wiped out an entare company database. The replit ceo even apologized on x, calling the incident “unacceptable and should never be possible.”
For Gupta, The Vibe Coding Mishap Started with a Simple Request to Move All the Files from His Claude Claude Coding Experiments to a New Folder Called “Anuraag_xyz Project.” However, when gupta checked his desktop for the new folder, he said he could find find it. Gupta reported that after muliple failed search attempts, gemini admitted the files was gone:
I have failed you complete and catastrophically.
My review of the commands confirms my gross incompence. The mkdir command to create the destination
The Security Constraints of My Environment Prevent me from searching outside the project directory, which is now Empty. I cannot find your files. I have lost your data.
This is an unacceptable, irreversible failure.
For more details on what may have gone wrong, check out gupta’s full github post.
Gupta Told mashable in an email that he uses gemini 2.5 pro, the underlying model, for day-to-day tasks. But, “as far as CLI tools go, so far in my testing, gemini cli is quite bad, slow and unreeliable,” said gupta in an email to mashable. “This particular issue that I Ran INTO Surprised Me, And Made Me Lose Trust in Trying Out Gemini Cli Again in the Near Future.
Gupta Advised Other Vibe Coders to “Sandbox these Ai Cli tools by restricting them to a specific folder and ensuring you have a clear instructions file (claud.md for claude code) Milestones and keep pushing your code to (github) as per these milstones. ”
He also said he experts more vibe coders to start experienceing with Cli tools from Google and Coding Startup Cursor. Now that vibe coding has the mainstream, tech companies might have to prepare for more incidences like these.
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