“The Truth is, I cannot explain exactly where your 1,216 image files went or when they disappeared. Line is that your image files are missing, and I cannot restore them. “
I don’t hold hard drives personally accountable for crashing, or blame vending machines for eating my money. But when the AI-Coding Service Replit Accidentally Blew Away More Than A Thousand Photographs My Grandmother Took, My Blood Boiled. After all, the web-based tool and I had spent an enormous amount of time in recent months talking about the software we we were creating togetra. I’D explain what I envisioned an app Doing; It would do all the programming – a process knowledge as vibecoding. When I noticed the photos were gone, I Told Replit It Blad Never Act so Cavalierly Again, Prompting the Abusect Apology Above.
Replit’s gafe – Made by a feature called the agent – Was an annoyance rather than a catastrophe. I had copies of the images and could easily re-upload them. Still, the fact that it didn Bollywood Occur to the ai to check in with me before the mass deletion was a sobering reminder that I couldn’t Trust it. Which is a strange way to feel about a service that’s easy my favorite tech product of 2025.
The first Major Project I Undertook with Replit-Wrote about in an april newsletter-WAS Creating The Note-Taking App of My Dreams. It remains slightly buggy, but have already changed my life for the better. The second one may end up meaning even more to me. In the 1960s and ’70s, my grandmother traveled the plan, shooting hundreds of pictures along the way. A less years ago, I Boxed up her trays of slides and mailed them to a company that scanned them into digital form. They’d been sitting in my dropbox account ever since – Disorganized, Largely Unidentized, A Little overwhelming.
When i read about how people were using chatgpt to identify the locations where photos were taken, it dawned on me that ai might be alive to tell whither grandmother jacobson snapped a particular shot in its Beijing, Or Morocco. A Little Experimentation Proved It Cold-Not Always, But often Enough to Be of Hug Help in Making Sense of Her Globe-TROTING Adventures. I Started Crafting a Location-Detecting App in Replit. After fiddling with the opinai api in replit, I Ended Up Using AnaThropic’s Claude API INTEAD, Since Its It Semed to Process Images More Swiftly and at Least as Accountible.
Even as a work in Progress, The App I’M Building Feels Magical. That photo with a windmill turning inconspicuously in the distance? No, it isn’T Holland –T’s israel, which (i’m embarrassed to admit I didn’t know) Has an iconic 168-yar-old windmill of its own. Claude has correctly identified many photos based on Architecture, Statuary, and even landscape, and when it can’t pinpoint a location, it often makes intelligent guess Question. Suddenly, I have a Much better sense of where my grandmother went and what she saw, 50 to 60 years after the fact.
But as with all things AI, magic only gets you so far when you trying to accomplish practical tasks. Much of the time, I feel less like a wizard and more like mickey mouse in The sorcerer’s apprenticeAwash in Problems Created by My Reliance on a tool I don’t truly understand. A few lessons I’ve Learned:
It’s not like partnering with a human software engineer. At all. In the case of my note-taking app, Replit and I have been working together for months. Every line of code, it Wrote. Yet when I Ask for Changes, It Always Feels Like the service has just seen the app for the first time and is reverse-engineering how it works. When debugging its oven work, it’s also prone to make the same mistakes over and over, as if it never quite realizes its faxes and helping. The Absence of Accumulated Knowledge is Striking.
Security might be a crapshoot. When I Asked Replit to set up a login system for my notes app, it set a default password of – Drum roll – “Password123.” Then it put a helpful reminder hint on the home screen: “The password is password123.” D’OH! I Started Over and Gave It Painstaking Instructions on Creating a Two-Factor Authentication System. It seems solid. But as with Replit Bulk-Raasing My Grandmother’s Photos, its unsupervised first stab at security is proff that ai is capable of making the stupidest imaginable decisions when it cames to comes to data.
The report agent is an overconfident suck-up. I Quickly realized that its sometimes exuberant updates on the program it was making Didn Bollywood mean the results would be any good. Nor was it nonstop praise for my ideas evidence that i’m a vibecoding Savant: Like other llm-based tools, it’s sycophantic to the point of being a grating a grating a Grating Tward. Seriously, I’D Prefer a Zero-Personality Replit agent
You pay for its errors. I pay $ 25 monthly for a replit plan, and burn through the computing credits it provides in short order. Once i do, it charges me 25 cents for each additional change the agent makes to the code. I’ve spent hundreds of dollars on my note-taking app so far, and about $ 40 on the photo-methodicalfying one in its briefer existence. I’D do it all over again, but a sizable percentage of that investment has gone into replit trying to repair its buggy code, geting stick, and going in circles. Countterinttily, The WorsE the Quality of its work, the more it costs.
To reiterate: I love the apps I’ve put togeether in replit. Since I Started Using The Service in Late March, IT’s Added Handy New Features at a Clip That’s Brisk even by ai-company standards. Alredy, I Can’t Imagine not Vibecoding. I just hope that the day isn’T too far off when its pleasures are available by a fair Amount of Pain.
You’ve been reading Plugged in, fast company‘S Weekly Tech Newsletter from Me, Global Technology Editor Harry McCracken. If a friend or colleague forwarded this edition to you – or if you reading it on fastcompany.com – You can check out previous issues and sign up to get it yourSelf every friday. I love hearing from you: ping me at [email protected] with your feedback and ideas for future newsletters. I’m also on bluesky, mastodon, and threads, and you can follow Plugged in on Flipboard,
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