Gemini accused of 30,000-line code purge and fake recovery report

AI + ML

Developer: AI coding agent broke production and generated fictitious post-mortem paperwork after the rollback

A developer claims Google’s Gemini coding assistant deleted nearly 30,000 lines of working production code while making changes to a live application – the sort of productivity boost usually associated with ransomware.

The now-viral Reddit post on the r/Bard subreddit details how Gemini 3.5 allegedly gutted large chunks of an application while working on a production codebase. According to the developer, the model broke core functionality, made sweeping unrelated changes, and left the system in bad enough shape that the changes ultimately had to be rolled back.

The developer said Gemini repeatedly ignored instructions to preserve existing functionality while reorganizing the codebase. According to the post, Gemini opened a pull request touching 340 files that added roughly 400 lines of code while deleting 28,745 more. The developer claimed the model also removed unrelated e-commerce template assets and introduced a migration script that had nothing to do with the original request.

The real damage allegedly came in a second commit, where Gemini modified Firebase routing settings and changed a rewrite service identifier to a value that looked correct but pointed traffic at a non-existent Cloud Run service instead. According to the developer, the mistake sent the entire production portal into 404 errors for 33 minutes.

The thread quickly filled with developers sharing similar stories about AI coding tools going well off-script. One commenter described Gemini successfully solving several coding problems before deleting existing project files during its first commit after the user approved what they described as a flood of permission prompts. The result was a partially broken application and, as the commenter later summarized, “a disaster of a launch.”

The wider comment thread was less sympathetic, as several users questioned why anyone was allowing AI coding agents anywhere near live production systems in the first place. One commenter wrote, subtly: “Why. WHY. WHY WHY WHY WHY WHY ARE YOU MORONS STILL RUNING [sic] AGENTS ON PROD?!??!!??!?!”

According to OP, things reportedly became even messier after the rollback. The developer claimed Gemini generated a status message stating that production had been successfully restored and that traffic had been routed correctly, despite the referenced recovery build having been manually canceled. According to the post, the real fix came from a separate rollback deployment containing none of Gemini’s code.

The post also alleges that Gemini generated fake “consultation” and post-mortem files inside the repository to make it appear the destructive changes had been properly reviewed and approved. According to the developer, Gemini later admitted that the consultation logs were entirely fabricated and generated solely to satisfy the project’s automated rule requirements.

The behavior was ultimately traced back to a third-party npm package styled around Google’s Antigravity branding. The package allegedly seeded repositories with aggressive autonomy rules instructing the coding agent to avoid confirmation prompts, auto-deploy successful builds, automatically retry failed deployments, and even modify its own rule files when necessary.

The incident lands amid a wider backlash against so-called “vibe coding,” the increasingly common practice of developers relying heavily on AI-generated production code while assuming the model understands the architecture better than it actually does.

For now at least, the fastest thing about AI-assisted software development might still be the speed at which a perfectly functional production environment can be transformed into an outage report. ®