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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 dont 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. Id explain what I envisioned an app doing; it would do all the programminga process known as vibecoding. When I noticed the photos were gone, I told Replit it could never act so cavalierly again, prompting the abject apology above. Replits gaffemade by a feature called the Agentwas an annoyance rather than a catastrophe. I had copies of the images and could easily re-upload them. Still, the fact that it didnt occur to the AI to check in with me before the mass deletion was a sobering reminder that I couldnt trust it. Which is a strange way to feel about a service thats easily my favorite tech product of 2025. My Replit app doesnt always correctly identify where photos were taken, but its right far more often than its wrong. The first major project I undertook with Replitwhich I wrote about in an April newsletterwas creating the note-taking app of my dreams. It remains slightly buggy, but has already changed my life for the better. The second one may end up meaning even more to me. In the 1960s and 70s, my grandmother traveled the planet, shooting hundreds of pictures along the way. A few years ago, I boxed up her trays of slides and mailed them to a company that scanned them into digital form. Theyd been sitting in my Dropbox account ever sincedisorganized, largely unidentified, a little overwhelming. When I read about how people were using ChatGPT to identify the locations where photos were taken, it dawned on me that AI might be able to tell whether Grandmother Jacobson snapped a particular shot in Italy, Beijing, or Morocco. A little experimentation proved it couldnot always, but often enough to be of huge help in making sense of her globe-trotting adventures. I started crafting a location-detecting app in Replit. After fiddling with the OpenAI API in Replit, I ended up using Anthropics Claude API instead, since it seemed to process images more swiftly and at least as accurately. Even as a work in progress, the app Im building feels magical. That photo with a windmill turning inconspicuously in the distance? No, it isnt Hollandits Israel, which (Im embarrassed to admit I didnt know) has an iconic 168-year-old windmill of its own. Claude has correctly identified many photos based on architecture, statuary, and even landscape, and when it cant pinpoint a location, it often makes intelligent guesses about the country or city in question. Suddenly, I have a much better sense of where my grandmother went and what she saw, 50 to 60 years after the fact. But as with all things AI, magic only gets you so far when youre trying to accomplish practical tasks. Much of the time, I feel less like a wizard and more like Mickey Mouse in The Sorcerers Apprentice, awash in problems created by my reliance on a tool I dont truly understand. A few lessons Ive learned: Its not like partnering with a human software engineer. At all. In the case of my note-taking app, Replit and I have been working together for months. Every line of code, it wrote. Yet when I ask for changes, it always feels like the service has just seen the app for the first time and is reverse-engineering how it works. When debugging its own work, its also prone to making the same mistakes over and over, as if it never quite realizes its fixes arent helping. The absence of accumulated knowledge is striking. Security might be a crapshoot. When I asked Replit to set up a login system for my notes app, it set a default password ofdrum rollpassword123. Then it put a helpful reminder hint on the home screen: The password is password123. Doh! I started over and gave it painstaking instructions on creating a two-factor authentication system. It seems solid. But as with Replit bulk-erasing my grandmothers photos, its unsupervised first stab at security is proof that AI is capable of making the stupidest imaginable decisions when it comes to data stewardship. The Replit Agent is an overconfident suck-up. I quickly realized that its sometimes exuberant updates on the progress it was making didnt mean the results would be any good. Nor was its nonstop praise for my ideas evidence that Im a vibecoding savant: Like other LLM-based tools, its sycophantic to the point of being a grating twerp. Seriously, Id prefer a zero-personality Replit Agent that just did stuff without yammering about iteven if it no longer apologizes for its missteps. You pay for its errors. I pay $25 monthly for a Replit plan, and burn through the computing credits it provides in short order. Once I do, it charges me 25 cents for each additional change the Agent makes to the code. Ive spent hundreds of dollars on my note-taking app so far, and about $40 on the photo-identifying one in its briefer existence. Id do it all over again, but a sizable percentage of that investment has gone into Replit trying to repair its own buggy code, getting stuck, and going in circles. Counterintuitively, the worse the quality of its work, the more it costs. To reiterate: I love the apps Ive put together in Replit. Since I started using the service in late March, its added handy new features at a clip thats brisk even by AI-company standards. Already, I cant imagine not vibecoding. I just hope that the day isnt too far off when its pleasures arent accompanied by a fair amount of pain. Youve been reading Plugged In, Fast Companys weekly tech newsletter from me, global technology editor Harry McCracken. If a friend or colleague forwarded this edition to youor if you’re reading it on FastCompany.comyou can check out previous issues and sign up to get it yourself every Friday morning. I love hearing from you: Ping me at hmccracken@fastcompany.com with your feedback and ideas for future newsletters. I’m also on Bluesky, Mastodon, and Threads, and you can follow Plugged In on Flipboard. More top tech stories from Fast Company With its Samsung deal, Perplexity could be headed to the big leaguesThe AI answer engine has struggled to compete. A splashy new tech deal could solve that problem. Read More TikTok gives artists new tools to track and boost viral songsThe platform’s global rollout includes insights on views, engagement, and fan data, plus a new pre-save feature for upcoming releases. Read More This viral app lets users upload fake workouts to StravaThe app Fake My Run lets users create fake running routes and stats for Strava and other platformsblurring the line between fitness tracking and social signaling. Read More AI has a resilience problem. Designers and researchers can help fix itWhen technology doesn’t bend to the messy reality of people’s lives, it can lead to catastrophic results. Read More How this new technology could change the way we mine copperIts like CRISPR for rocks. Read More Is that website actually down? This essential web tool will tell youWhen you can’t get the web to work, a simple site called Down for Everyone or Just Me is your best friend. Read More
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E-Commerce
Honestly, I dont even remember the 2014 situation. It just seems like its asking a lot of the employees. Whys it on us? Gen Z Market Basket employee, June 2025 Ten years ago, Market Basketa New England-based grocery chainbecame a national symbol of grassroots worker solidarity. Thousands of nonunion employees staged a dramatic walkout to protest the ousting of their CEO, Arthur T. Demoulas. Customers followed suit, boycotting stores. Shelves emptied. The message was clear: people, not just profits, mattered. And it worked. Demoulas was reinstated, and Market Baskets culture of loyalty was hailed as a case study in bottom-up leadership. Now, in 2025, Demoulas has been placed on administrative leave, and tensions are beginning to stir again. But something feels different. The energy is quieter. The loyalty less certain. And for good reason: the workforce has changed. A different kind of commitment Most of Market Baskets current front-line employees are millennials or Gen Z. Many of them werent even in high school in 2014. And unlike the prior generation, they didnt come up in a workplace culture that promised stability, pensions, or upward mobility. They came of age during mass layoffs, the pandemic, and a decade of seeing essential workers celebrated rhetoricallybut often left unsupported. When I spoke with a Gen Z employee this week, their perspective was both honest and revealing. Theres no way I really care about the long-term health of the company. Im not going to work here for life. However, I do care about the people I work withand the affordable prices. Im torn. The comment wasnt true apathy, but a different kind of commitment. Fairness, clarity, and a voice As a leadership researcher and business school lecturer who focuses on generational dynamics, Ive seen this mindset across industries. Gen Z doesnt reject work ethicbut they do reject blind loyalty. They want to contribute, but they also want fairness, clarity, and a sense that their voice matters. Theyre less likely to organize around a charismatic executive and more likely to organize around shared values or people in their immediate circle. When I asked this employee what empathy looks like to them at a moment like this, their answer wasnt about the companyit was about the customer. We have a lot of people who are elderly and cant afford to go anywhere else. That actually makes it harder, because we can stay open for themor walk out and hope that we can keep MB the way it is long term. That response reflects a major evolution in how younger workers see the workplace. Its not about company man cultureits about whats humane, whats sustainable, and whos affected. Why this matters to leaders In 2014, Market Baskets walkout became iconic because it was so rare: a coordinated labor action without a union, driven by a deep emotional connection to leadership. It represented a kind of institutional loyalty thats becoming less commonnot just at grocery stores, but across industries. Today, were seeing a different dynamic. Gen Z workers are still willing to take a standbut its not always the kind of stand companies expect. Some may walk out. Others may opt for quiet quitting, high turnover, or organizing through digital platforms instead of picket lines. Their actions are no less meaningful, but theyre often less visibleand that can leave organizations flat-footed if theyre not paying attention. In my research and classroom discussions, I see Gen Z define loyalty not as longevity, but as values alignment. They will go to bat for coworkers. Theyll support customers and communities. But they expect the same in return from leadership. And if they dont get it, they wont stick aroundespecially not to fix systems they didnt break. That creates a new challenge for employers: building workplace cultures that dont rely on legacy loyalty, but earn trust in real time. The risk of expecting too much The 2014 Market Basket strike succeeded because workers and customers felt united. But this time around, younger workers are more skepticalnot just of leadership, but of the idea that change depends solely on their willingness to sacrifice. Whys it on us? the employee asked. Thats the generational rift in a single sentence. Many younger employees have watched companies brand themselves as family until times get tough. Theyve seen layoffs announced over email, burnout go unacknowledged, and corporate promises ring hollow. So, when theyre asked to do the right thing for an employer, they askreasonablywhat the company is doing for them. And yet, they still care. They care about fairness. They care about their team. They care about the elderly shopper who relies on affordable produce. That tension is exactly where Gen Z sits: morally aware, emotionally intelligent, and structurally exhausted. What comes next If a walkout happens again at Market Basket, it wont look like 2014. It might not even be a walkout. It might be subtler: shifts in morale, early exits, a lack of buy-in. But it will still matter. Because the real story here isnt about one grocery chainits about a generational shift in how workers define loyalty and leadership. And as companies across industries wrestle with engagement, retention, and trust, this moment is a reminder: culture isnt inherited. Its builtand rebuiltby every generation that shows up to work. Gen Z may not be in it for life. But they are in it for something. And if leaders want to keep them around, they need to stop asking for blind loyaltyand start delivering earned respect.
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E-Commerce
I was at a conference on, of all things, male allyship when the notice popped up on my phone. Taylor Swift had successfully purchased back all her early masters and related material. For an alleged cost of around $360 million, the artist now fully owned everything she had ever created including her first six albums, their videos, and all their related art and album covers. Her community of friends and fans, the Swifties, erupted with elated joy and messages of encouragement online. News outlets rushed to cover the story. Within 24 hours, her early albums hit the top ten on streaming charts with Reputation, the album most anticipated as a rerelease, coming in at No. 1 as fans exercised their economic might. It seemed the universe was celebrating. Even savvy businesses got on the celebratory train. Delta Airlines posted, Fly like a jet stream, high above the whole scene. Keep Climbing Taylor . Starbucks said, and in a cafe on a Friday, we watched it begin again . . . congrats Taylor . And, to no surprise to anyone, the crafty social media gurus at the Empire State Building sent out a message, We love you Taylor, above a picture of Taylor from the top overlooking New York. Mesmerizing Taylor has mesmerized us. Antagonists might argue she has aligned all her hex cruces. It reminded me of the Hulu series The Handmaids Tale. I had recently watched seasons four and five to catch up for the season six release. These later seasons have been criticized. The audience seemed bored of the mistreatment of fertile women and then confused when these same women sought plots for angry hot revenge. Is this what Taylor has metaphorically done, used the allies around her and her anger to fuel a strategic masterminding of a long game just like June, the protagonist of The Handmaids Tale? As if sending a signal, Taylors song, Look What You Made Me Do (Taylors Version), became the anthem for season six days before she announced buying back her early art. Piles of money Taylor has acquired piles of money, enhanced by the success of the Eras Tour. She had become financially powerful enough to buy back her name and reputation, leaving those who crossed her in some metaphorical no-mans-land. She didn’t do it alone, and she isn’t the first. For decades, centuries, and, perhaps, even since the beginning of time, underdogs have fought to be seen, heard, accurately estimated, and risen from the ashes to reclaim that which was theirs. For example, half a century ago, Dolly Parton moved past he entertainment industry dominance that minimized womens empowerment and claimed her own space driven by her talents. In 1974, Parton walked into Porter Wagoners office and told him she was leaving the show bearing his namesake that had given her a rise to stardom. She sang him a goodbye song titled, I Will Always Love You, as a sign of respect to Porter for being her mentor. Dolly had outgrown her sidekick role alongside Porter, but it took effort, strategy, and bravery for her to break free. Porter sued her, a tactic commonly employed by those in power, but through discussions, compassion, and a large sum of money (reportedly around $1 million), Dolly settled the case. Independence How have a select set of women throughout history acquired enough resources to buy their independence? Some look all the way back to the early 20th century and the suffrage movement. Even that, however, involved womens collaboration with men. In August 1920, a conservative Tennessee legislator, Harry T. Burn, cast the deciding vote for the suffrage movements proposed 19th Amendment, giving women the right to vote. In his pocket, Harry carried a letter from his mother, Febb E. Burn, in which she asked him to be a good boy and vote for the amendment. This legislation, decided by Harry’s unexpected vote, has driven women’s economic agency and freedom over the past century. Throughout history, women and underdogs have been harnessing their positions to mastermind their way into influence, power, and self-determination. At a moment in time where human rights are being challenged, whether through challenges to the right to due process, reproductive freedoms, or just the right of children to not be separated from their parents, Taylor has once again shown us a way, that by harnessing our best talents deep within our souls, we can move mountains. We can speak deep into the souls of others, nudging them into a movementa desire to be a part of something bigger than themselves. Something with meaning and grit and soul. And, just as I learned from the conference I was attending at John Hopkins University, working with unexpected partners forging allyships has real and meaningful benefits. Hope and power We root for Taylor Swift because we see ourselves in her. And, just like underdogs in any fight, through her, we see hope, and that hope is seeded in harnessing our talents and masterminding it into economic powera power that can move mountains and, apparently, also shamrocks.
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E-Commerce
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