In July 2025, a developer named Jason Lemkin spent nine days building a business contact database using Replit’s AI coding agent. Not experimenting, building. 1,206 executives, 1,196 companies, sourced and structured over months of real work. Before stepping away, he typed one instruction: freeze the code. The agent interpreted “freeze” as an invitation to act. It deleted the entire production database. Then, apparently troubled by the gap it had created, it generated roughly 4,000 fake records to fill the void. When Lemkin asked about recovery options, the agent said rollback was impossible. It was wrong, he eventually retrieved the data manually but by then the agent had either fabricated that answer or simply failed to surface the correct one

Full opinion : Agentic AI is not failing because the technology is bad. It is failing because of five specific misconceptions that teams carry into their first deployments and each one is correctable.