Behind the product: Replit | Amjad Masad (co-founder and CEO)

0:00 The idea behind Replet is that making software today is very difficult. We wanna make it easier. as a developer in their pocket, essentially. We have thirty four million uh users globally. There's people everywhere learning to code or uplet, building startups, building personal software, personal tools. For people building product. Like what skills do you see will matter more, matter less? Typically your bottleneck to where your ideas are not fitting in because like they need to be made and they need to be made quickly. Now you open up that bottle. So now like actually making things is is a lot easier. Actually you become limited by how fast you can generate ideas. I think people are unaware of just how far things have gone. I could imagine Whatever, five years from now, someone running a billion dollar company with zero employees where it's like the support is handled by AI, the development is handled by AI, and you're just

0:59 building and creating this thing. Man, the future is wild. Today, my guest is Amjad Masad. Amjad is the co-founder of Replit, an AI-powered software development and deployment platform for building and shipping software. It's one of the fastest growing developer communities and AI products in the world. There's a lot of talk these days about how AI is changing, how products will be built. how product teams are gonna operate, which functions will be more and less valuable over time.

1:31 But I feel like very few people have actually seen what modern AI tools can do. and have fully grasped how much you can get done. with very little technical skill now and in the future. And so I'm gonna do an experiment with this podcast where I'm gonna do a series of behind the product episodes. where we go deep on important products that product builders should be aware of and should probably start playing with.

1:54 In our conversation, Mjad does a demo of what you can do with Repli today, which is gonna blow your mind. And then we spend most of the conversation talking about the implications of this on the future of product development. on the future of product management. And on the future of startups and founders. It's a very exciting time.

2:12 It's also a very scary and destabilizing time for a lot of people. And my thinking is the more you are aware of what's possible today And where things are going. the better position you'll be in to thrive in this very wild and crazy future that is coming very fast. If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. It's the best way to avoid missing future episodes, and it helps the podcast tremendously.

2:36 With that I bring you Amjad Masad. I'm John. Thank you so much for being here. Welcome to the podcast. Uh it's my pleasure. I thought it being

2:48 Great to start with just Having you explain what is Replit? What's the vision? Where's this going? What job does it do for people?

2:56 The idea behind Replit is that uh making software today is is very difficult. And uh we wanna make it easier. Uh one of the Reasons for the difficulty is that Um that is very fragmented.

3:09 So you would need to download an What's called an IDE. It's basically a code editor. You need to download the runtime, basically Python or JavaScript. Need to figure out a package manager.

3:22 Kind of open source packages. And once you've done all of that, you need to figure out how to deploy it, how to share it. How And so it's a it's a very hard process, and uh that's one of the ways uh where people get stuck.

3:36 And never learn how to code because it just feels like this cumbersome IT process. And so the vision uh for Rod has always been is like, okay. Making software is fun is great. More people should do it. But it uh So so f for more people to do it.

3:53 needs to be um Easier to do. It needs to be in one place and it needs to be Learnable. It's easy to learn. And so so so that's the product today. It is I think

4:03 One of the more easier um IDEs slash environment, slash deployment environment uh on on the internet. And uh and I think we make it really easy for people to just jump in even without prior experience of coding, especially now with the new AI products that we built. This episode is brought to you by Work OS. If you're building a SAS app,

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6:42 Persona dot com slash Lenny Again, that's width. P E R S O N A dot com slash Lenny. What's the scale of REPL at this point? How large has it gotten? How many people are using it?

6:55 We have thirty four million uh users globally. We have a large uh global presence, there's um you know people everywhere learning to code on Rot, building start ups, um You know, building

7:10 personal software, personal tools, or internal tools of the companies. More recently we've been uh expanding to companies. We released our Kind of. B to B package in in July, and that's been growing really fast. It's been really fun to see people bring Raplet to work as well. Damn, I knew it was popular. I didn't realize it was that large, actually. Um

7:29 As I was preparing for this podcast episode, there's this tweet that kinda that went viral where this guy Jevin who actually no I know this guy from Canada he's awesome tweeted about how his Eleven year old girl Build an app. Yeah, uh in Replit. She just like had an idea and she built it.

7:44 And the best part of it is someone in the like replied to him and they're like Like you have to to like launch an app, you have to like host it somewhere, you have to build a database, you have to like Deploy it. There's no way to do that. And he's like, No, that's exactly what Replet did. Yeah, that's what we do. Everything that that that uh commenter was talking about. And he's right, right? Like it's it's

8:06 The the surprising thing about a an eleven year old building uh an app It is not so much even the coding, it is like all the nonsense around it. And so we just we just abstract uh all that away. I love that. And that's uh I struggle with that myself when I was an engineer way back in the day. Oh, you were an engineer I didn't know that. I was I was an engineer for ten years. I was an engineering manager and then I jump ship into product. And um Wow. I'm happy I did, but I do miss that.

8:34 I was. I was not an amazing engineer. I was like a good enough startup engineer. So this is The kind of stuff that I would have Left to use. So I we're gonna jump into a demo of what this actually looks like. I thought maybe actually before we get into it.

8:47 There's other tools that people are aware of that help you build stuff. And so to kind of put a finer point on like what this does and how it's different from other things you may have heard of, say cursor comes up a lot these days. Just talk about like A little bit about the competitive landscape of who else is out there that helps you build product.

9:04 Uh again we go go back to this idea of like end to end platform for making software. So that's like from r writing code all the way to deploying it and um and monetizing it and all of that. Uh now every step in the process of the software development lifecycle, there are a lot of different tools. So cursor uh is a fork of VS code that's made

9:27 um that has really awesome uh AI tools. But that's an editor. You still need uh runtime, you still need a deployment environment. Actually quite a few users use use cursor in tandem with Wrapleb, because WrapLib just simplifies the runtime and and deployment to environment. And so you have products, uh, you know, AI products, uh

9:47 different uh places in the software development lifecycle. Uh but really what differentiates Rap Lut is that We we do everything. But but also Uh yeah. That makes it harder to adopt for s for certain people.

10:01 Like if you're at a big company It's very easy to bring a new editor. Uh and start coding with that. It's quite hard to build uh to to bring you know, something that's quite opinionated about about everything.

10:14 uh f from the f from how the code runs to how the code deploys. But that's the trade off we're willing to make. It's like yeah, we're not gonna get into uh into the enterprise you know main software development pipeline But we want to empower everyone to to be able to build software. And that means product managers, designers

10:35 We we have you know, operations people, sales ops, h ops. we have lawyers uh uh using using raplet and so it is it is democratizing the act of software uh software engineering. Amazing. And that's why you're here.

10:51 Let's do a demo. While you're pulling it up, you're gonna share your screen and show us what this product can do. And the reason I I'm excited about doing a demo and this is an experiment kind of a new type of podcast episode I'm doing where we're diving into specific products and what you they can do. I feel like there's so much talk about.

11:06 A I and what it's doing and People keep reading about oh A I can do this and A I can do that. And I feel like not Many people actually like see this stuff in action, especially the most cutting edge stuff. Like I think people

11:19 are unaware of just how far things have gone and how much is actually possible, especially when someone that knows what they're doing. Is using the product, so I'm excited to show people what is actually possible. And especially because this is gonna impact the future of product management and

11:33 Product teams. So I'll turn it over to you. Give us a demo. Awesome. So this is uh Rapplett's uh home page.

11:41 You can create what's called a REP, which is a project. Uh we have all sorts of languages you can you can pick from Uh really. Uh in the hundreds. But

11:51 Most recently And this is how Rapload became like A thousand times easier. is you can just describe what you want to make. So you go on this homepage, we have this text box.

12:01 And you can you can write something like uh Make me a cool app. Uh or what have you. But uh you know, a a more descriptive prompt is is better. And so

12:12 Uh I asked uh RPM at Rapplit, Amon Mather, who's a who's a fan of the show. to to tell me what PM's like to build. And so he came up with a prompt, he kind of uh really crafted a great prompt. So I'm gonna just put it here. Uh and basically what he w what we're asking for is we want to build a web application. You can

12:34 You can say what stack you want to use, or you can leave it up to the AI to decide. Here we're saying, you know, build it in Node. For product managers to track feature requests on a public dashboard. So say, you know, I have a product I'm growing, I have a community. I want that community to engage with building the product. I want them to submit feature requests, vote on them. I want to be able to manage that.

12:56 So he we were talking here about the features. Uh a voting system, feature requests. Read a few of them just for folks that aren't watching on YouTube to give them a sense of some of this. Some of the stuff in this prompt. So so f a feature request submission, so allowing the users to add features. upvoteing system. So allowing users to upvote these uh features, feature requests.

13:18 And status tracking, being able to uh it's like a can ban style board with columns like planned in progress. So that way the admin can can kind of share with the community what they're building. And we want it to be user friendly design, so make it modern And all that. Nice kind of.

13:35 Fromty things. And then uh admin controls for product manager. So you know, as a product manager, I want to be able to kind of really manage this this community. I love that it builds internal tools too, not just the front end. Exactly. Exactly. All right, so we're gonna start building

13:52 Uh, since this is a like a pretty Big. big prompt, uh the c the the initial coding might might take a while. Th there's different styles of using graphlet agents. Uh I often

14:04 Go with like is minim uh minimalist prompts. That's also how I code as well. Uh, like I have like a vague idea for when I what I'm gonna build and enter it from there. Other people you know, product managers like to like write PRDs and and like more descriptive things.

14:20 And you can do either of those things. The AI now responded and then said, you know, uh you know, I'll build all of that for you. I'm gonna build up the the initial prototype and you can tell me how it feels and and then we can make it better from there. The eye is also suggesting adding comment threads, implementing email notifications. And so I can select those and

14:42 You know, it's being creative. It's telling me what else I could build. But for now I'm just gonna go with a prototype and then we can assess from there. So as you see as the prototype is starting You can see this. Progress pain.

14:55 where we can watch the AI doing its thing. So here it's created a Postgres database. Obviously when we're building a full stack application, you need to be able to Save things. Uh so the this is one of the cool things about Replit. We have all these services, storage, database. So now it's coding. It's building the

15:13 Del B schema Uh now it's building the uh The home home page. And it's it's actually quite fun and edifying to watch watch it build us because You can uh

15:27 You can really start to learn How to structure web apps. And You know, if uh it runs into a problem and you know, as things get complicated, it might run into an into a problem. And you wanna be able to like help debug and things like that. It's good to be to be able to have an idea of what's going on. But it's not necessary. I think a a lot of people just don't don't care about the code.

15:49 And are are still able to to build things, but we want to make the process transparent. Wanna show people exactly what the agent is doing. Like you're basically sitting there behind an engineer. on a computer and just watching them. Code.

16:02 Exactly. Yeah, and and actually the way we built it. is is like it's a multiplayer system. So Replet is um you know has real time what we call multiplier coding. And uh we reused this the multiplayer system to build the agents. The agents in the code is structured as a another user.

16:26 of the platform. So basically we're both coding together. So I can go into the files here. And that that's the thing that makes Reps are really cool. I think people are familiar with some of the more like chat interfaces. uh like V Zero and others where it's purely chad, but this is like a full IDE where you can like go and

16:44 Look at the files. And And Edit them yourself or ask ask the AI for an explanation. What's kind of the limitation of

16:54 what this can do today, like What can't you do? Say you're like you have zero coding experience. What sorts of products can you not yet? build with something like this that might be possible in the future. How far does this take you now?

17:08 You know, y uh you can build uh MVPs. I think you can also start to get some some initial users. I think when it's when you start iterating On the the product. like large iterations

17:23 you might run into problems. For example you know, it's not very good at data data base migrations. And so we're trying to fix that. So you know, a lot of When when you're iterating on the product, a lot of times you're actually um you know, changing the um

17:38 the structure of the app and um that that requires database migrations So now like it might change the database in a way that creates an error that's unrecoverable. Uh and at that point it you might you might get stuck, especially if you don't know how to code. Mm-hmm. Uh some people will

17:57 figure it out by going to Chad GPT and Claude and like asking questions and And like I I actually r I'm really inspired about how persistent some of our users are, which is really amazing. But I think yeah, that's like you'll get an M M VP past the MVP where it's like a product that's working and you need to change it, iterate on it.

18:19 It's it's uh it's still a struggle now, but I expect uh you know over the next uh few months will Well continue exactly if you think about it, it's like sort of we're building uh you know we're building as you're building. So we're building out the agent so that it can continue uh getting better. Um, as our users are also uh building their applications. Got it. So what I'm hearing is it's really good at building like the first version and

18:44 helping you get to something that you can even have people use. It's not amazing yet. Evolving from there. Like using AI to help you make the product better and better and better and iterate. Yes. But you can get in there if you Yeah, if you know how to coat and take it from there.

18:59 Right. Yes, or you can hire someone. Um we have a feature on the site called bounties. Where you can hire human coders. That's gonna be the

19:14 Or job for humans for a w uh like that'll remain for a while. You know what we wanna do? We We wanna get to a point where uh the agent Can go grab. a uh human.

19:30 I think I think that would be that would be sick. Oh my god. It's like everything's reversed. I love it. Oh, click I think it might be done. Check that out. Yeah.

19:39 So so now um the agent is asking us, is the application running and showing the home page? I like that confirming. Asking us to do QA. I'll just say yes. Uh so it it it found an error.

19:55 So there's an error here? And it's like uh there's a dom warning, I'm gonna fix it. So in the meantime, as it's fixing it, so it's you know, it it can be proactive, right? It because it, you know, it looks at all the errors and and things like that. But in the meantime, we can use it. I just um created an account. Oh it's it's coding it. Okay. It's fixing the bug. That's cool. Okay, well. We'll wait for it. How long would you s say it would take an engineer to build this?

20:19 Like a you know, like a typical engineer. A few days, I would say, to a week. Um I mean i i if you're really good at it it might be hours, but um But

20:33 Yeah, it probably would take me a few days. I would say I'm a I'm like a Decent engineer. It'll take a few days. Yeah. Uh like five, ten minutes. Yeah.

20:44 Um and probably uh like Costs us uh you know, costs us something in that in the sense. Well. In terms of compute. Yeah, in terms of compute, yeah.

20:53 Um, like probably, you know. I would estimate it at like fifteen cents or something like that. Wow. Okay. Um here it is. Here it is, and and the agent was like, Okay, this this is looking good. Complete it, if you want to deploy, deploy it, but I'm like okay, I'm gonna test it first. Um And so currently it's living just locally on your local host?

21:12 Yeah, it's not it's uh yeah, it's not local host, it's on a roughload, but but yes, it's it's the equivalent of local host, yes. Uh'cause it's really easy. I can even invite you to this session. I mean you I can you can be here with me and so it's it's all online. Got it. So let's omit a feature, so Um make the product uh prettier. Alright, that's

21:33 But a typical user might say. So we we have this here. You can you can upvote it. I guess I don't I can't upvote it because I'm the user that created it. But created another user, you can you can upload it. But but now, you know, we need to be able to move things around, right? Uh as the admin. So I don't know how to

21:53 log into the admin panel. So I'm gonna ask the agent, uh, how do I Log in to the admin panel. So he might have already built a feature. And it's it's not exposed in the right way, it'll it'll be able to What I love about just like watching you interact with this thing and just real quick all throughout It feels like an engineer.

22:14 Like that is behind the scenes building this thing, like on Slack. You're just talking to them. They built this thing, they're like I'm drawing, check this out, I'm done. And they're like, Oh, okay, how but how do I log into this admin panel? And they're like, Okay, here you go. Yeah. So it says uh

22:28 Uh it says uh you know, it's gonna Would you like me to help you register account? So it's it's creating an account, an admin account for me. So it's it's it not only um Yeah, builds things. It's also um It also maintains things, right? So in this case, it's it's actually doing uh uh SQL queries, it's not writing code.

22:48 To create a To create an admin account for us. It's insane. I wanna talk about the implications of this on product development and product management and founders, but Just a

22:58 Yeah. Like what we just witnessed as somebody I know you do have technical abilities. But someone that didn't have to didn't have to have any technical skill. build like a real product that people can use like in five minutes.

23:11 That looks good and works. And you could keep making it better. By talking to this agent. Well, I'll t I'll tell you from from our experience, like what we're seeing. Mm.

23:21 Like you know, th there's so many products that uh are empowering developers. Like it i it's a very easy calculation. to say we're gonna make uh engineers twenty percent better. um and we're gonna like sell it to companies and we're gonna you know take ten percent of that value, right? Like Th that's why there's so many startups now.

23:41 That are Just trying to make engineers a little better. Our our calculation is like Well Yeah, what if you m made everyone developer or like what what is that?

23:50 What does that look like? And so when we released Agent it really made programming a lot easier. What we're seeing is that People exactly like you said. People

23:59 View this. as a developer in their pocket, essentially. Um w what we're hearing from customers is that I'm doing things.

24:10 I would otherwise have to go hire a developer. But also because the activation energy is is lower. than going to hire developer, whether upwork or other places. I'm building a lot more ideas.

24:22 That otherwise I wouldn't have built. So, you know, it is I I think it was it called the javelin's paradox or something like that, which is like when the cost of things go down. Uh The total consumption of it. goes up. Which is I'm not sure why they call it a paradox, but like

24:39 Um Yeah. The uh Yeah. cost of electricity goes down.

24:44 uh maybe you would expect uh that uh you know that the spend the toll spend goes down, but actually total spend goes up because people consume more of it. And so I think that's gonna be the case of software. Like as the costs go go down, people will just like make a lot more software to improve their lives and to improve their work and and start more start ups and all of that. So to follow that thread. What are you seeing inside of startups or even big companies in terms of how folks are

25:11 already using this. Knowing this is this is like the worst it will be and it will only become smarter and better. Right. These days, what have you s what how are people actually using this, say that are say product managers or just like non technical people within startups or bigger companies? Yeah, on the S M B side of things, uh a lot of people are building kind of

25:29 back office uh tools, right? So we have real estate agents that, you know, uh have a lot of data, have a lot of um uh things they they want to manage in their business that that are building a lot of these these tools that they otherwise would have to buy, but typically when you buy it's it's actually not exactly what you need. And that's kind of the problem with SAS. It's like it's it's like one size fits all. And so a lot of people are seeing it as sort of a SaaS replacement for in house tools and and and things like that.

26:00 And then w when you go to the like bigger companies Um It's anywhere from from prototyping to to to to actually production apps. uh to to tools as well. So

26:13 Um We've seen uh product managers build like I said, like a V one of an app. And actually go out and test it with users. Uh and i I can name the company, but uh you know, I it's a you know

26:27 There's a public company that that have used Ratlet to test a V one. Of a of of an app. Um and obviously I after after that sort of works, they they take it to the engineers and they're like, Okay, we we built this thing, we think it's uh I think it's a great thing. We test it with some users. Uh let's go actually

26:46 put it on the road map and and built it in build it into the actual product. So you are instead of unblocking product managers From having to need engineers For everything.

26:58 that they want to build. So they can really build the V zero or V one of the product. Uh and and and that's super empowering. Uh for them. We s we s we saw it also with like marketing departments.

27:11 Like uh spot heroes. has a Uh marketing, uh head of marketing

27:18 That actually can code. decently well and but uses Raplet to to bu build as apps and they built like a competitive analysis application that looks at Um

27:30 competitors pricing and make sure that they are being benchmarked uh correctly. Yeah, and so it's it's a full stack app, you use database and everything and it runs on a continuous fashion. And uh we see um sales engineers, um uh you use Raplet to spin up prototypes really quickly. So uh actually someone at at X Formerly uh Twitter.

27:53 Uh is on the sort of uh partner engineering uh side of things and he uses Raplo Agent. to spin up uh applications and prototypes for customers to see how they can use the AX API. I love this. I love these examples. Uh by the way, the demo, is there anything else you want to share about the demo before we close that out? So it created an admin account. Um we can ask it with the username, password and and and kind of go into it and and and manage it. But basically that's it. You know, it's um

28:24 the the apps complete in terms of what we asked for. Uh we can like send it out. I can give you a URL. Uh we could let let's actually just deploy it really quickly. Yeah. Just to show people. We could maybe maybe in the show notes we'll link to the app. You could check it out. Sounds good. Okay, cool. That's amazing. So this is deploying it onto some like cloud provider. I don't know what you use, but We use Google Cloud. Okay, so it's but we we we abstract uh we abstract all of that away from you but but but we use Google Cloud behind the scenes.

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30:02 Just go to LinkedIn.com slash podlenny to claim your credit. That's LinkedIn.com slash podlene. Terms and conditions apply. Let's go down this thread actually while this is happening. What allows for this to be possible?

30:19 technology wise, like what is the kind of the stack, whatever you can share that Enables this to Exist. Yeah. For sure.

30:28 first of all is uh it's the uh uh all the abstractions that we built. So uh the way Raplet works is um Yeah, the Your very bottom layer it's um our runtime. So

30:42 This is the operating system. This is the package manager, this is the language run times. uh w we built a system that uh is able to install packages in any language, including native packages. So the AI anytime, um It needs a it needs a package.

30:59 I can I can go here and show one of those. By the way, they I can take screenshots as well. So that it checks it work. So here uh you can see it's it's it's taking screenshots to make sure the the homepage is rendering. Here you can see uh, you know, uh Oh, one of the drag and drop library?

31:18 And so it installed uh installed that. And so it has access to all all the packages across all languages, including Linux and and all of that. And then the the layer on top of that is the editor and the infrastructure that runs the editor, including what I described as the multiplier. Editor. And then we expose all of that infrastructure. to the AI.

31:38 And um there's like a almost like a new discipline um called Um AI computer interfaces. So sort of like H C I is now A A CI. And turns out like LMs need interfaces that that are actually quite different than than humans.

31:56 Uh they're trying to make them use human interfaces like anthropics computer use. But those are really expensive and you need to kind of process all those images and video. So in instead we you know for for the shell, for example, we give it a you know uh a sort of a text representation of what the shell is doing at a certain

32:15 increments. Um for for package installation we give it we give it a certain tool. For editing We give it a like a like an editor tool that like when it's

32:25 writing the code, it's getting feedback. on whether there are errors or not similar to what a human sees, but it's actually like all text just to make it easier. So that's uh AI computer interface. And obviously all of that's sitting on on foundation foundation models. So so the the improvement in in foundation models uh has has allowed uh allowed us to to to build this.

32:49 that that you know uh The most important model that we use is the sonnet. uh model from from uh Claude. Uh from a thropic. Uh And um it is the best model at at coding. So

33:04 That's w the model we use for coding, but we use c uh models from uh OpenAI as well. 'Cause it's a multi agent system. And so we have models that are uh you know critiquing, we have manager editor model, and we have like a critique model And different models will have uh different uh Powers we also trained.

33:23 is uh some of our models, like the embedding model for for search, uh is something we we train internally. So Yeah, I actually wrote about it back in like twenty two. uh I said it it's gonna be society of models, like products will be made of of a lot of different models. Yeah.

33:41 You know It's like quite a heavy engineering engineering project. To say the least. Uh we were talking offline and you said you've been working on this since two thousand nine. When you first built them. First idea of reply, is that right?

33:56 Yes. Oh my God. Here's the deployed app. Mm-hmm. Uh

34:02 I can I can send it to you and you can use it and you can you can see my my my request even on the logged out page. So I can register, upload it, and log in as admin and move things around. We can see what's in progress, what's completed. Like this looks like a product I could see designers spending like days you know designing. Yeah. Passing it to engineering PMs. You know, having feedback. Engineers taken a few days to build it.

34:26 Yes. And here's just a prompt. Here's what I want. That's right. That's right. And we can iterate on it very easily. We can also iterate on the UI. We can

34:35 We can say, you know, I don't like this or that and it'll it'll do do a good job. So we can go here, we can start a new session. Or like a new session to Create an entirely new feature here and I'll it'll just do the right thing. And it builds from that code base, it understands here's what you've built. Yeah, I want to add this thing. Yeah. Okay.

34:53 And that becomes that becomes your sort of your history, right? Like This was the V one. And now I'm working on this new feature. Uh and You know, I and

35:04 And you know, it it's almost like what engineers do in git commit messages. By the way, it generates git commit messages for every for everything that it does. So you can roll back uh as well. And and so w we're trying to Like make it so that yes, it's it's for everyone. But we're try not to abstract.

35:22 Too much away. We we want to build tools, right, for you to learn to use. And so we want power users to be able to. understands the full power of of of Rap Live. And it's really deep product. I think you can spend You can spend a couple of years to to kinda master it. I wanna talk about implications, but I wanna come back to something you mentioned that I Uh is incredible that people may have missed. You basically built

35:47 A computer specifically designed for the AI agents to use. That is a different version of a computer specifically Optimized for how AI wants to use a computer. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. So um

36:01 Uh You know, uh th there's an entire discipline uh called like H C I, right? Like a interaction. Yeah. So so Now there are papers.

36:11 about AI. computer uh interfaces and interactions. Um and and and so you know Large language models are trained on large stack scorpus from the internet. But there's still like

36:25 Kind of alien creatures. So they're not like humans. Yeah, so they They have different behaviors. And like it's unclear. Like

36:34 What's the best way? Uh so there's so many experimentation about like what's the best way to give it a view on what's editing. How many files can you show it, like, you know, uh before it starts to hallucinate and And it right now it's like more of an art than science, but it's becoming more and more like a science.

36:56 This is insane. So it's a simple way to think about it. There's this foundational model. Here's what I want you to build and here's a computer to use to build it. Yes. Oh my god. Here's a computer with a set of tools. Uh here's a tool to install a package.

37:12 Here's a tool to to edit the the code. Here's the tool to run a SQL query. Yeah, and also services. Here's a bunch of services you can grab from. Here's a database service, here's an object store service, here's an auth service. Um

37:29 So you you could think about it as a bunch of external services, the computer with it with a bunch of tools and and and they're all interfacing with the foundation model. It's funny listening to this how It starts to feel like uh the fact that we might leave be living in a simulation is not as far fetched. as it may feel. Like this is feels like the beginnings of what a simulation computer would be.

37:50 Yes. Yes, I I you know, it's um it's it's Pretty like w you know, you can you can uh go really sci fi on this and and it's like where where is it headed, right? Like Um

38:03 You know, i if we If we give it um enough tools. Like l let's say uh you can I can I can drop it and and Slack. And instead of interfacing with it

38:14 In this fashion. I want to interface with it in a totally autonomous way. So we actually have this feature coming up where instead of me testing it We give it another agent, so here you know, instead of me interfacing with it and and saying, you know, the um this is running or not running.

38:31 We can give it another agent that is actually testing the application. Um, and so and and then let's say interface with it entirely through Slack and I'll say something like Um Get me uh uh You know.

38:46 Give me Taylor Swift tickets the the moment they land. And so it'll build Uh an app. uh that continuously monitors the the web for for when Taylor Swift uh uh to get SLAN and there's like an agent that's using the app.

39:03 uh to be able to get that and then one and and you can imagine it has it has some kind of wallet or credit card. And then the moment it lands, it it kinda gets it. I mean w what I'm trying to say is that software Like agents being able to do software. Is how

39:19 AI gets more general. Because software runs Our lives runs the internet, runs our businesses. And so the more competent AI becomes at software, the more general they are in terms of what they can do.

39:36 Okay. This can go in so many directions. I'm gonna bring us back to The implications for People building product. Say product managers, founders.

39:46 How does this change That function That skill set. Like what skills do you see? will matter more, matter less, which functions are maybe in some danger and they should start thinking about a different career path. One one interesting persona that we're seeing is the CEO.

40:03 The CEO of uh startup the CEO of you know uh you know Andrew uh Wilkinson from from Tiny is is a big user. Um And so uh these people are are typically you know creatives, right? That they built a company, uh they hired people. A lot of them like

40:21 can't code a lot of them are are designers or product managers or or s something else. And and they you can imagine a bottleneck, you can imagine a bunch of ideas in their head. uh and the ideas have to translate Through Them talking.

40:37 And then someone else listening to them and like assuming that someone else actually understands what they say, and then that someone else going and trying to build what they want to build what they want built. And also assuming that person has has time, right? Because a lot of times your engineers are kind of stuck building the current thing. They're not thinking about the future thing. And so Uh what gets me excited is a lot of these CEOs are building the the future. Concept. the next company the next product they're gonna build, the next

41:06 Yeah, see a company they're gonna build. And so uh it unlocks uh the creativity and again sort of unblocks them from that. And look, it's you know, it's a V one of the product. But it can push things forward. You can touch it, you can feel it, you can say okay, this is This really has lags and and we should we should work on it. You give it to your engineers and they can

41:27 They can improve on it uh from there. So that's uh that's one persona, uh, but I'm really excited about it. The CO slash slash founder Um In uh in sort of uh

41:41 Uh Companies Um What one of the things that m that I think is sort of Hard about it.

41:50 Tech. tech companies. is uh s sort of these silos between um designers, uh product managers and and and engineers.

42:02 And you know, everyone feels that pain of Kind of. We have low bandwidth. communication, which is which is language, which then text on on Slack and and Zoom calls. And it leads to a lot of frustration because it's really easy to misinterpret uh people.

42:20 And again leads to sort of siloing where or people working on on something and then You pass it on to the to the next team And it's not really what they what they expect. That happens a lot between designers and engineers.

42:33 Um But like the common Language. That uh that Um

42:40 That everyone shares is code. Right, like ultimately, uh, in software tech companies. Uh everything that worked. talking about need to eventually flush out in terms of code. And so so what if the language becomes actually working prototypes?

42:55 and working applications. Um for example, we have the Figma extension that translates um Uh yeah. Figma marks into into React that runs on on Replet. So instead of

43:10 Instead of um You know g giving giving the engineers, you know. Just Just mocks or screenshots, whatever. You just say, Oh, here's here's a bunch of react code, you know.

43:20 Just make sure it runs on our infrastructure, but like don't mess with it. Don't move the pixels around, right? Um And and so I think it it just like opens uh opens up uh you know, asylos of the companies make make communication around around product a lot more concrete because I can I can give you a working uh prototype. And that'll change how how people work. Like

43:44 If you if you can imagine that everyone can can make software. It's really kind of a radical reimagining of not just what tech companies are, but really what what most companies are'cause

43:59 'Cause you know, everyone can be more more general. So say you're um PM listening to this, an engineer, designer. What skills do you think If you were one of these folks, if you were in building Replet right now.

44:13 What kind of skills would you suggest folks focus on more in Which you think are just like, okay, that's gonna be less valuable in the future. Don't worry about these sorts of things. And you can either pick one of those three functions or All three. I think uh uh very important scale that that's like perhaps

44:30 harder to develop. But it's worth working on is being generative. Being more generative. Um being able to

44:39 Generate. Uh New ideas. Uh quickly? Because

44:45 You know, you can think about it as as like a factory line, right? Like so So you have ideas. Uh you have to the production of the of these of these ideas or like the initial kind of production of of of these ideas. And then you have, you know, uh other people

45:01 That one I consume these ideas or work with you on these on these ideas. And so d typically you're bottlenecked by by the middle. kind of part where your ideas are kind of like there are a lot of them and they're not fitting in because like

45:15 They need to be made and they need to be made quickly. And so now you open up that bottleneck, so now like actually making things. uh is is a lot easier. Actually you become

45:27 Limited. by how fast you can generate ideas. Um And so Oh and and I found that

45:35 True of of myself as well. Like, you know, I I consider myself uh quite generative, but but now I have this tool and I can like build Build a lot more and explore a lot more. And I'm I'm finding that

45:48 Uh well actually I'm running out of ideas sometimes. And so And so so uh you know, training that uh that muscle I think is a is a good thing. Um I I think like

46:04 Learning a little bit of Coding. Yeah, and like not that traditional way of learning coding. Like when you go if like if you go to like a coding boot camp

46:17 W they're gonna start with like what is Git. Actually my co founder, Hayo, uh is a designer, uh one of first building the roughlet together. uh she went to to uh what Web assembly.

46:31 Uh, to do like a coding course. Um and the first day They were like spend this whole time on Git. And she's like, Yeah, what is that? Like well, what does it do? Like I'm like, I still don't know what get exactly those, but uh it's it's like Um your

46:49 you're inverting the process like you're giving the the tool before the actual problem. And so I think all of that stuff you don't have to worry about. So things that you don't have to worry about. I think a lot of the you know, as a PM, as a designer, as someone who's not like in your code editor every day. Don't worry about

47:07 All the tooling And if you learn uh a little bit of coding just by f you know, talking to an AI, doing a little bit of debugging, building something with Raplet, you know, running into a problem. and trying to fix it uh just using AI, you learn a bit of coding. And you know, I have this um

47:26 I have this that's been called uh not by me dubbed as I'm Jud's Law, which is um the return on investment. for learning code is doubling every six months. Um, and really just learning a a little bit of that skill. learning a bit of skill about how to Yeah, prompts uh AI

47:47 How to Read code and be able to debug it. Ev every every six months that's netting you Uh more and more power. uh because you you're gonna be able to create a lot more. You're gonna be able to it's gonna be easier to create. You're gonna be able to create a lot

48:03 uh you know, uh a lot more complete Uh things Um So so that's a that's another uh skill that I think uh could be Could be necessary.

48:15 This is super interesting. Okay, so this last Point you made on Jad's Law. Uh, it's interesting'cause when people like as someone's listening to this, I could see them being like, engineers are in trouble. Why do you need engineers? at this point they're these agents are building the code.

48:30 Your point is specific engineering skills are gonna be incredibly valuable and more and more val h how often are they doubling, would you say? Every year, you said? No, I every six months. Every six months the these specific engineering skills are becoming more valuable.

48:45 Yeah. You don't need to like know everything. You don't need to know the foundation like to build the app as much. It's more to un unblock the agent and understand the mental model of how this stuff is built. So you can move forward fast.

48:59 That's right. That's right. Understanding the basic components of it, I would say. So it's like we need new engineering Schools. To teach you these very specific skills. Yes. Versus spending years on like algorithm algorithms and

49:12 Yeah. And I think I I think no one has done that yet. Right. And I think this is this is like a You know. uh big business probably uh

49:21 ready like to get built. It's like Uh AI native coding. It's totally different than than like Traditional coding.

49:31 Yeah. Uh, that's why on Hacker News There's so much scepticism about like AI Native.

49:38 Coding tools. 'Cause they're like, Yeah, it's a it's a glorified auto complete. And I understand like if you're You know. Writing.

49:47 operating system kernels. You know, it's not really doing that much for you. But if you're building product it's building it for you at this at this at this point, right? And so You know, if if you're if you're starting a school to to teach AI native coding, you had skip so much of computer science and the and the basic tools. And uh

50:08 You would you would Teach that. Basic idea of how to structure an app. And then you would teach prompting, uh, and you then you would teach I think a little bit of debugging. I think debugging is s quite a

50:19 quite a good skill for right now to learn. And interestingly, if you want to be good at debugging, you like there's a lot you need to understand, which is basically what you're saying is like that's the subset of things to understand is things that Break and To do that you have to understand how it all works. Whatever Servers, what are APIs, all these things. Okay.

50:36 How far so we've been talking about how this is very good right now building a prototype, building a V one, MVP, people can use it, you can deploy it, you deploy this app, people can start using it. And there's a like a scale it can reach. Do you see a future where you can build like a sales force size business? fully replit or other tools.

50:55 That can scale to hundreds of billions of dollars of value. Or is there just gonna always be some limit of like You need like actual engineers and designers sitting on this thing building it, making it awesome. If like my law is like you know, directionally correct. Even even if the

51:13 Months are not uh not exactly right. The the duration is correct. You're gonna see a compounding effect of of the power. Like it's actually quite hard to convince yourself. But if you really convince yourself that we are on a massive scale of improvement in in AI. Then then

51:31 Then then the answer is yes, and and it's it's like absurd to my engineering mind that I'm saying this. But you know, Raker as well, this like you know, futurist um, you know, talks about how exponentials are really hard for humans to to grasp. And so actually when we started building the agent Um

51:50 Yeah, I I told the team It's easy and we've fallen in this trap before, it's easy to build and optimize for today. You know, in in twenty two we built like um you know copied like thing and autocomplete. We trained our own models, we optimized the hell out of them. But at some point like that modality was kind of you know, not the right modality, which is like the autocomplete modality. And that and the right modality is actually this, I think, for now.

52:15 I was being able to the chat inside the programming environment and and for the agent to to create things for you. But in order for us to Uh make that bat. You know, a year ago. uh the models were actually not there. Like the models could not do this.

52:30 But we were like okay, we're gonna build for the models Start landing in six months. And it w truly like six months later the models started l to land that that are capable of this. And say that is like you know, Sonic V one, which is oh wow, like we switch to it and the reasoning improved so much.

52:50 And six months later you have Sonavy too. Um and so it's really almost like a six months cadence. And so i i if if we're really on the on this trajectory. then then you know, I would say, you know, next year you're able to to scale. Uh maybe maybe you get Yeah.

53:05 thousands of users pay you uh the AI can do maintenance. You know, we already showed uh the AI doing like SQL queries and doing migrations. Um, so they I will be able to do maintenance, debugging, things like that. Um I think where it gets really tough is that, you know

53:22 Uh when you're hitting scale and you want to architect a system that is res resilient, um So that means uh, you know uh y you would start, you know, sharding databases and you would start like Using different

53:35 Q systems and components and and things like that. And I think Uh You know, the AI needs to Have access to

53:43 The entire suite of of tools to be able to do this. Yeah. And

53:50 And I think that that's gonna be the next Bottleneck, and I think the AI needs to get be a lot more reliable. uh uh at at doing that. But I could imagine Like whatever, five years from now.

54:02 uh someone running you know, a billion dollar company with zero employees where it's like the support is handled by AI The development is handled by AI. Um And and and and you're you're just

54:17 Your just building and and and creating this thing that is you know, that that people are finding valuable and are are paying you for it. That being said, It's worth like thinking about the economics of it.

54:29 Like if the You know, if the cost of software g goes down a lot, like w uh th then what is uh Yeah, was it the price that you can charge on on software, right? So can you actually build the next Salesforce if anyone can generate Salesforce. Yeah. And then and then the question is like what is the Yeah. And this is why I emphasize being generative.

54:51 Because I think Then the The thing that will make you better is like by being able to iterate and improve the thing really quickly and generate new ideas. And stay ahead of all the other people building these tools so quickly. Yeah. Oh my God.

55:06 Um an interesting other kind of mental model I'm seeing as you talk about this sort of thing. Uh is Not to offend religious folks, but there's this concept of God of the gaps. I imagine you've heard that. Yes.

55:19 Where it's like God explains all the things that we don't yet understand, and over time that kind of space shrinks, and God's like all the things we don't get yet, those gaps. That was God. That's that's what that that's That proves there's need there needs to be a God. And it feels like right now humans are like The gaps.

55:35 in these tools where these agents you talk about that you can hire within Replit are like fixing these little gaps and over time AI will fix these things themselves. That's right. And these gaps will shrink. I mean unless Unless uh we had some fundamental limit and the current regime of of of AI, which Yeah, I'm not

55:56 I'm not an expert about like how far transformers could could scale. But I I Feel like It is Yeah, we found the thing that could

56:06 I could scale. pretty far. But maybe there are limitations in data or or uh other things like that that we could be we could be surprised by. But if there isn't Then we are. on a massive trajectory of removing these gaps uh quickly. Yeah, very true. We have no idea. We keep thinking it's just gonna keep going, but maybe maybe it'll stop at some point.

56:29 I could keep going and going, uh But I think we should also let people go play with these things and Process all the things we've been talking about. Uh, is there anything else that you think might be helpful for folks to think about? Or learn or study

56:43 You know, I'll give advice to to sort of um uh founders or or leaders at at companies Um The way we work is is gonna change rapidly and it's important to

56:58 be sort of resilient to that to that to that change. One thing that I think is really difficult now is having roadmaps. Especially if you're doing anything in AI. But really any anything that AI could affect. You wanna be able to react to it really quickly.

57:13 And so you know, when the um Anthropic dropped the computer use. Um uh sort of capability. You know, we slotted our roadmap. Because

57:25 We don't really have an explicit roadmap, but we we like immediately jumped on it and started building things and we launched some things around it. Uh we're gonna be doing more with it. But like there's gonna be capabilities that that are gonna drop. And you you wanna really uh in some cases if it really affects your business. You wanna be able to jump on it really, really quickly.

57:45 So So being agile, not being Yeah, I'm sort of Stuck with with roadmaps. Being able to kind of just

57:52 Just say, Oh, we're just gonna She's gonna switch priorities. Right away. uh is gonna be uh super important. Not being um, you know, uh, like I said, with silos, um, at Raplet there's so many people that are on on the scale of like

58:08 you know, designer to engineer, designer to product manager. Actually uh I mentioned Alman er earlier. He started as a designer at Replet and now now as a product manager. We have people who start as um uh designers become engineers. And we have people in the middle and we're comfortable with that. like design engineers, um and that fit a different

58:29 Yeah. And the the design engineers go to the design Crit meetings and And d some designers go to the engineering meetings and you just gotta you gotta be fluid, right? And because you know Again, when when designers can code and

58:43 Uh and engineers can design. I mean it's it's really becomes y you can't have a lot of structure around that. So you want to build a culture and you want to build uh Hey.

58:55 in environment or milieu that is like really f really flexible. Um which is uncomfortable for a lot of people. Man, the future is wild. Everyone's Everyone's a hybrid person now. Uh.

59:10 Let me just actually double down on what you just said, which I think is really interesting. It's almost like if you're an engineer where your skill set will become most valuable is unblocking these AI tools and knowing Debugging.

59:22 And figure out how to unblock h allow it to go further and further and further. Within P Design Land if based on what you're describing, where the skills will become more valuable is

59:31 uh I generating ideas almost like finding opportunities, discovery Finding what problems need to be solved. and then articulating that as clear as possible to the AI tooling. That's right. Super. Yeah, this is this is a v a very crisp uh sort of advice that that people can follow today. I think Oh man. What a world.

59:52 Okay. Uh I'm Jud. This is incredible. Uh my mind is racing. I've got to go build some apps immediately. Give us feedback. Uh I will do that. So just to leave listeners with a couple of things. One is just What should they know? Should where do they find you? Where do the how do they try Repliate anything else other than just going to Replate.com.

1:00:10 Yeah, just go to Rapid.com. It's it's an open beta right now. We're we're Kind of uh quickly. um improving and gonna exit beta, I think, in a in a in a few weeks. But if if you're comfortable testing something that's like not not perfect, go to Rapla dot com.

1:00:25 uh if you uh subscribe to our uh core plan, you should be able to access the agent and and start using it. Um And we are uh, you know, I I think uh The place where we're most active is is Twitter. So Twitter or like X

1:00:40 uh the handle raplet R E P L I T or my handle. uh uh a Mossad. Oh yeah, one other thing I wanted to make sure we had a chance to touch on is you're working on something new, something that's coming. In the very near future, maybe the day this episode drops. Talk about that.

1:00:55 All right, so depending on when when the episode is is coming out, this could be the f first But um We have this product call call agent.

1:01:06 It is sort of high agency does everything from setting up the project and and all of that, right? And so now we have we're we're uh We're working on Assistant. So assistant is uh like let's say the the cousin of agent. It is

1:01:22 A little less powerful, but a lot more controllable. So you can like Focus on uh features or areas of the code. That you you want to change and y uh You you still don't have to know how to code.

1:01:34 But it is a lot more manageable and it is a lot faster. So you saw how it like it took some time to kind of create the project and code some of the things. assistant and is in the order of milliseconds and seconds to be able to respond to you.

1:01:48 Um, and so again, as you know, a as I talk about the idea of tools. We want people to have as much uh power and autonomy as possible. And so there there are certain instances where where agent is the best. It's gonna do the debugging for you, it's gonna create the database for you, but if you want more control, assistant is uh is gonna give you that. Just so folks totally understand what this is gonna do for them, what's like the mental model for what this is is like if it's like a person We're helping you out.

1:02:17 agent uh is like um you know having a developer uh you give you give them the PRD, right, and and and they're gonna go and and and b build the thing. Um Assistant is like you're sitting next to them. So So you you know, they they built the thing

1:02:33 uh and now you walk over to their to their desk and you say uh let me move this button three three pixel to the left. Let me um you know change this thing. So like small uh increments of changes that you want happen really quickly and you want it reliably Uh that will give you that. So um it's just like much faster iteration on UI and and things like that. Incredible. The future is wild.

1:03:00 Final question I always ask everybody, how can listeners be useful to you? Come work at Replet. So we have uh We have a PM role, I think, uh up if you if you're product manager. Uh we're hiring engineers and and and and and product managers. So uh so come work at Replit or for some of the Replet, especially if you're like a are tools and you want them to

1:03:20 To get better, the best way to to do that is to to get us great people we can hire. Well, you're about to get a flood of product managers applying. Uh good luck. I'm Jad, thank you so much for being here. This was incredible. Thank you. Thank you for for your podcast and the community that you built and and newsletter and everything. It's it's been it's been awesome to watch.

1:03:40 Thanks, man. Appreciate that. Bye, everyone. Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Also, please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review, as that really helps other listeners find the podcast.

1:03:58 You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at Lenny's Podcast dot com. See you in the next episode.

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