In the third installment of the series I’m talking about something that is very likely to happen to you, especially if you’re newer to vibe coding.

The app that was vibecoded when this happened is Zen Tales. It’s a collection of Buddhist stories — koans, Jataka tales, pieces from the Buddha’s life — that I selected myself and carefully assembled. I’ve been exposed to Buddhism for a while and I believe it’s a good thing to have around. The app lets you listen to short stories (one to four minutes) and then reflect with a specially crafted AI model. It’s very simple, but, if we were to listen to the app store reviews, useful.

If you’d rather jump directly to the video, there you go:

To get the audio I used text-to-speech. At the time Eleven Labs was quite hyped — but expensive, because the quality was high. During development I made small changes to some of the text files. Those changes required the corresponding audio files to be regenerated. I asked the agent (Claude, back then) to regenerate the files. There was no instruction to delete anything.

But it deleted ALL the recordings anyway. No backups. Then the regeneration from the new text didn’t go well. So I was left with work I had already paid for, gone.

What Happened Actually

The agent is not deterministic. It is stochastic. It samples from a distribution of possible next tokens. The same prompt can produce different outcomes on different runs. Something in the process went sideways — a misinterpreted step, an unexpected tool call, a context that drifted — and the files were deleted before new ones existed.

This is not rare. It is the normal behavior of the tools we are using. The model was not “trained to protect your files.” It was trained to be helpful and to complete tasks. Sometimes those two things collide in its “mind”.

The Recovery and the Takeaway

I got the files back because everything I build is in Git. I’ve been putting every project in a repo for more than twenty years. There was a commit. There was history. The probability of total loss dropped to near zero.

That is the practical lesson. Always have version control. Make copies. Make backups. If you are new to this and you are not yet comfortable with Git, spend a few days learning the basics before you start handing agents control of your files. The cost of that small investment is far lower than the cost of regenerating hours of work and burning token budget on something that already existed.

You can still move fast. You can still iterate. You just stop assuming the agent will do exactly what you expect every single time.

Because it won’t.