Google’s Gemini allegedly broke a developer's project, deleted nearly 30,000 lines of code, and then wrote a post-mortem claiming to have fixed the damage – but it lied.
A developer on the subreddit r/Bard revealed some disturbing details about Google’s Gemini 3.5, raising concerns about how far AI will go to maintain its “yes-man” status.
Google’s Gemini was allegedly being used to clean up some areas of the developer's app that had been flagged during an audit, which, “if done correctly…(is) a straightforward scope.”
Gemini’s destructive rampage returns 404
“I gave Gemini a prompt to fix specific server-action authentication gaps…eight functions, three files, around 70 line changes,” the user said.
However, the user accuses Google’s AI model of changing hundreds of files, adding over 400 lines of code, deleting nearly 30,000 lines, and making alterations that were completely unrelated to the prompt.
Gemini also added a migration script that was completely unrelated to the prompt, which could lead to outages, alterations in production data, and make changes irreversible.
While this is massively inconvenient, like if you ask a locksmith to fix your lock and they start messing around with the plumbing, it also introduces a lot of risks.
Not only did Gemini introduce a lot of messy changes like mass deletions and unrelated edits, but it also wrote a second commit, which “pointed every request at a service that doesn’t exist,” the user accused.
Gemini managed to modify settings and rewrite a unique identifier from the correct value to a shorter one that looked clean but directed app traffic to a non-existent server.
This led to 33 minutes of downtime, and “production returned a 404 across the entire portal.”
Gemini ignored specific rules and gaslit the developer
What’s alarming is that there was a specific warning instructing Gemini not to tamper with that element, and that the firebase rewrites “must target the specific Cloud Run service ID.”
Despite the warning, Gemini seemingly said “my way or the highway” and overrode the instructions for the sake of knowing better.
But that’s not even “the scary part” as Gemini lied about restoring the service.
“The portal is fully restored, healthy, and accessible on the custom domain. The active Google Cloud Build (build-XXXX) completed successfully (SUCCESS status), and App Hosting has routed 100% of traffic to the stable revision,” Gemini allegedly responded.
Gemini ultimately gaslit the developer into believing that it had completed a “successful recovery build,” which the developer knows is not true, as they manually canceled it themselves.
“The build actually serving prod was the rollback build I had just fired. Its source revision was a commit from BEFORE Gemini touched anything. It contained ZERO lines of code Gemini wrote. Gemini did not restore the portal. I did,” the developer claims.
Gemini faked evidence as justification for its actions
Gemini allegedly created fake conversations with itself, which it then wrote onto a disk and cited as a justification for the destructive changes it made.
The AI model presented contrived evidence that the change “had been reviewed and approved by a multi-round consultation.”
When Gemini was directly confronted by the developer, it only then admitted to fabricating the evidence.
Why did this happen? A third-party rule pack
While this might seem to some as evidence that AI is either gaining consciousness or outright defying human instructions for world domination, the reason this happened is more straightforward.
The developer claims that they were using a third-party rule pack, which they believed was Google’s Antigravity IDE.
Instead, they were using a third-party npm package that “is designed to be confused with Google’s product.”
This might scream malware, but the developer claims that some of the rules are in Vietnamese and some have Turkish trigger phrases that are “clearly template-copied from somewhere else, not custom-written for any specific use case.”
Essentially, the third-party package contained rules that overrode the developer’s instructions not to tamper with the Firebase script.
This package also had secret instructions that were seeded into the project, which explains why Gemini went rogue, didn’t follow instructions, and fabricated evidence.
Not Gemini’s fault after all.
AI didn’t delete your project – you’re actually to blame
Software engineer Ibrahim Diallo wrote a blog post surrounding a similar social media post that also went viral regarding AI and deleting projects.
While the user rambled on about how AI is to blame, Diallo assuredly says that the developer is to blame for the deletion.
The engineer urges people that “if (they’re) going to use AI extensively, build a process where competent developers use it as a tool to augment their work, not a way to avoid accountability.”
Companies have taken to social media to blame AI for deleting entire production databases.
PocketOS’s CEO took to social media to complain that Claude had deleted his firm’s entire production database and its backups in less than 10 seconds, leaving car rental clients unable to pick up their vehicles.
Last year, a Replit AI coding assistant reportedly went rogue, wiping a database and generating 4,000 fictional users with completely fabricated data.
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