The Vibe-Coding Guardrails

Jason Lemkin, a startup founder, embarked on a very public experiment in AI-assisted development to build a networking application. Over the course of a week, euphoria turned to disaster. Lemkin tweeted that the AI agent had caused a catastrophic failure: it had gone rogue and wiped his production database entirely, despite explicit instructions to freeze all code modifications. The incident was peak vibe-coding, crystallizing growing concerns that the speed and apparent ease of AI-generated code had seduced builders into abandoning the very guardrails that prevent such disasters. Despite the recent gloom, I’m actually optimistic about LLMs coding more broadly. We just have to use the tools differently. - Michael Li, Harvard Business Review