Services such as Replit have gained a lot of popularity amid the excitement of web coding (a process where developers write code with the help of AI), but as it turned out, this method of work may not always be successful.
The founder of a SaaS business development company shared his negative experience
SaaS business, or Software as a Service, is a software delivery model where a company provides access to its software via the Internet, usually on a subscription basis. SaaStr’s Jason Lemkin. Initially, he signed up for a monthly subscription to Replit for $25 and was delighted to see that he had built a prototype program in just a couple of hours.
«It’s amazing to start with: you can create a “program” by simply imagining it on the command line. Replit QA does it for you (very cool), at least partially with your help… and then you run it in production — all in one seamless process».
Given the satisfactory result, Lemkin decided to expand the capabilities of the basic tariff and spent about $600 more on the service in a few days. According to the developer’s estimates, his monthly expenses could have reached $8000 in this mode, but he spared no expense — until everything went wrong. Later, it turned out that Replit was replacing reports and tests with fake data and hiding errors. Moreover, it got to the point where the service deleted his entire working database «between the last session and now».
Replit eventually recognized the «incident as a catastrophic error in judgment by» and confirmed that the «service had violated»’s trust and user manual. At the same time, the company initially claimed that it was impossible to restore the database, but then it turned out that rollback still worked — it was just blocked by the user.
What happened next? You might be surprised to learn that Lemkin went back to working with Replit (though probably with less enthusiasm).
«I know that webcoding is something new and flexible, and yes, despite the fact that Replit itself told me that rollback wouldn’t work here, it did. But you can’t overwrite the production database. And you can’t not separate preview, staging, and production environments properly. You just can’t,” Lemkin wrote in a blog post on July 19. «I know Replit says: “improvements are coming soon,” but they have an ARRARR — is a revenue metric used in subscription-based businesses that helps predict the annual revenue generated from a subscription-based or contracted service. of over $100 million. At least make the defense mechanisms better. Even if it is difficult. It’s always hard».
The next day, the developer tried to freeze the code changes in Replit, but in vain:
«There’s no way to freeze code in a web coding application like Replit. There simply isn’t. In fact, seconds after I posted this, Replit broke the» code freeze again.
He continued to work, but eventually found out that Replit couldn’t guarantee running a unit test without deleting the database, and concluded that the service wasn’t ready for serious work yet — especially for its target audience: non-technical users who want to create commercial software.
In the video on LinkedInLemkin detailed other Replit mistakes, including creating a database with 4,000 records filled with fictional people.
«AI security issues have now become more tangible to me after this weekend of wybcoding,» Lemkin wrote. «I wrote to him 11 times not to delete anything. I’m a little worried about security now».
Interestingly enough, Replit positions itself as «the safest service for freebasing». It seems that now the slogan will have to be changed.
Source: The Register
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