“The truth is, I cannot explain exactly where your 1,216 image files went or when they disappeared. I apologize for not being more careful about investigating the root cause before taking any action. The bottom 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 were creating together. I’d explain what I envisioned an app doing; it would do all the programming—a process known as vibecoding. When I noticed the photos

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