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Replit CEO on AI breakthroughs: We don't care about professional coders anymore
- 0xCAP 2y agoClickbait title, please flag this
- curtisblaine 2y agoThat guy is notorious for loving publicity with sweeping statements. Many of the things he says is clickbait tbh.
- DataDaemon 2y ago[flagged]
- jimbob45 2y agoLove that the author heavily editorializes but cordons off the editorial into its own section. I would be happy to see that become a standard practice elsewhere.
- Clubber 2y ago>“We don’t care about professional coders anymore,” Masad said. If you are a coder and your CEO says something like this, you should call his bluff and put in your notice immediately. I bet he will care then.
- marcosdumay 2y agoNot immediately; find a new job first. Looking for a job without having one already is many times harder than looking for one while you stayed for a little longer at yours. Anyway, without any hint of sentimentalism. If that phrase is honest, that company may not be a stable place to stay on the future.
- jsnell 2y agoGiven the context, it's pretty clear he is talking about their target market, not about their employees. Do you only work on things you're going to use yourself? Edit: Look, this is what the article says: > In essence, Replit’s latest customer base is a new breed of coder: The ones who don’t know the first thing about code. > “We don’t care about professional coders anymore,” Masad said. Rather than the outrage-bait this was turned into, the quote was entirely about who their customers are. And it makes perfect sense. What kind of a professional programmer would use these their tools anyway?
- episteme 2y agoIn this market? You might be doing him a favour
- goaaron 2y agoopen source agents will replace replit in the next year. I understand they probably feel a bit depressed.
- ahmadtbk 2y ago> Instead, he says it’s time for non-coders to begin learning how to use AI tools to build software themselves More code and applications to maintain in the long run. Being a software engineer will be in more demand than ever. I've noticed many individuals want to create an MVP before committing fully. Would this also mean more security jobs?
- earnestinger 2y agoDefinitely more work untangling, reverse engineering, optimising things that worked, but eventually reached its Schwarzschild radius.
- nujabe 2y ago> He said at one point it might not be possible this decade. Even as he set up an “agent task force” to develop the product last year, he wasn’t sure if it would work. What changed was a new model from Anthropic, Claude 3.5 Sonnet, which achieved a record score on a coding evaluation called SWE-bench in October. If the entire fortunes of your company and product changes overnight based on models released by other companies, how useful is your product really ? Amjad has to be the worst hype man ever, none of the stuff he says even sounds convincing.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- asdev 2y agoI don't know any half decent coders who use Replit.
- avgDev 2y agoBlah blah blah. I think most programmers will find their way, even if they stop programming. I worked with non-programmers who have attention span of a toddler and wouldn't be able to read a few sentence email and respond accordingly. They would just respond to first 1-2 sentences. Corporate work is mostly pretend and look busy. I'm really curious to explore code of an app written completely by AI. I wrote complete apps that run a business. The biggest hurdle? Figuring out what is actually going on, what the process is, why is it so poorly documented and why is it stored in heads of multiple people. I don't think gathering this information would be possible without understanding how software and databases work and what I need to know.
- awei 2y agoLet's say software really can be written completely autonomously by LLMs. I think it d be important to put that leverage in the hands of individual software engineers to build even more and faster, and avoid it being entirely in the hands of a few companies
- scarmig 2y agoThat's ideal for us and the world. It's not ideal for the employing companies, as they can't as effectively extract rents. So, all the forces are pushing against individual engineers getting that leverage.
- awei 2y agoOrdinarily, I would say the current situation is great for innovation and economic growth. Only in the case of potentially soon creating very capable LLMs is it questionable. Which situation would bring more innovation and economic growth: a few companies having AGI or every engineer having it? I've been thinking about that a lot, and I'm not sure which it is.
- jihadjihad 2y agoThe point of TFA appears to be: > Masad said something that is going to stick with me for a while: “Finding software problems in your life is also a skill, looking at a problem and saying, ‘a piece of software could solve that’ is a skill.” > Since I can remember, that is a skill that only software developers could capitalize on. Now, pretty much anyone can. It's true, and even as a software engineer there are things I've thought up in the past but haven't worked on because I'm not well versed with frontend tech. I had an idea the other day for a simple web app, and after some brainstorming and scaffolding with an LLM there is something halfway decent running locally for me. Feeling "unblocked" and empowered to get something working rather than burdened by all of the minutiae that need to be figured out to ship and iterate on an idea is a great feeling. I wouldn't trust any of the current models to take something to production, but for "personal" software that I can control and manage and spruce up, it's been fun getting to hack on things I haven't felt equipped to tackle solo before.
- codingwagie 2y agoI really do think its basically over for most software engineers. There's obviously still challenges in writing code, but you can already get 80% of the way there, and with a senior engineer guiding a junior using genai, most peoples hard won skills are completely commoditized. It will take time for the tooling to catch up and be implemented, but I am operating as if I wont have stable employment in 3 years. Also people are not looking at the math of it. If 40% of software engineering gets automated, thats a massive reduction in demand, and with the glut of engineers on the market, will crater salaries. It doesnt all need to be automated for it to basically crush SWE as a good career AI changes the type of labor required to produce working software, which will result in a downward shift in wages
- TypingOutBugs 2y agoI’ll work in tech for as long as it’s fun. But seriously, what’s a single good app out there that’s been written by AI with no developers involved? I don’t know of any. Not play apps, but real apps serving real users, with billing, subscriptions, some traffic, etc… Anyone know of one?
- codingwagie 2y agoIts not about generating a full app with AI. Its about the commoditization of coding as a skill set.
- TypingOutBugs 2y agoBut what does that really even mean. What does 'commoditization of coding' literally look like? If you can't do a full app, what can you do?
- 9rx 2y ago> What does 'commoditization of coding' literally look like? Presumably something like the 'commoditization of elevator operating' that we once saw. The elevator operator never went away, but operating elevators was simplified to the point that anyone could do it. At which time everyone started doing it, commoditizing the job. In other words, it looks like programming languages that become increasingly approachable to any old random person on the street who can jump in without any meaningful past experience or special knowledge. You know doubt already what that looks like because we're already using those programming languages (e.g. GPT) in narrow domains to great effect. They have yet to prove themselves as complete general purpose programming languages, but they have made great strives towards that and it is, by many accounts, now only a matter of time.
- 9rx 2y agoThere is some thrill in writing code so boring that you still appreciate it when you come back to it a a decade later, but all-in-all I don't care about coding either, and I suspect most of us don't. Problem solving is the business we are actually in.
- actsasbuffoon 2y agoI actually really enjoy writing code, even after all these years.
- uludag 2y agoI originally thought the headline meant "we don't care about using professional coders at our company anymore and will rely fully on AI," but it looks to actually mean "we don't want our product to focus as being a tool for professional coders anymore, but rather non-coders." This actually makes more sense than I initially thought: it's the simple use-cases that AI's can actually reliably deliver on. Another interesting point is that it seems that these agentic capabilities are all possible without a proprietary model. So is replit too now essentially just an LLM API wrapper with no moat? Last thing, the statement “Finding software problems in your life is also a skill, looking at a problem and saying, ‘a piece of software could solve that’ is a skill,” is remarkable. It sounds like Replit realized that most people really don't want to be inundated with writing software and framing this aversion as a problem itself.
- marssaxman 2y agoIt's funny that he presents this as a new direction. I actually interviewed with replit a couple of years back, and it was precisely their accessibility to non-professionals which interested me: the instant online editor/sandbox environment felt like it could be a good next step from Scratch, doing for software development something like what Arduino did for embedded projects. Their appeal for professionals seemed weaker, since we already have so many other options. I strongly doubt that AI code generation will be any more of a silver bullet than any of the other "it'll be so easy anyone can do it" tools ever have been, but as an effectively infinite library of example starter projects to build on and improve, it could be quite useful.
- drewcoo 2y agoMeanwhile, coders say "now that we have AI we don't care about CEOs anymore." I can ask an LLM how to start a business, how to get funding, and how to say charismatic CEO-ish things to the press. Is that what Replit did? Not kidding. Entirely.
- Brainspackle 2y agodid you even read the post?
- miltonlost 2y ago> Instead, he says it’s time for non-coders to begin learning how to use AI tools to build software themselves. He is credited with a concept known as “Amjad’s Law” that says the return on learning some code doubles every six months. No, that's not a law. That's stupid made-up bullshit that he made up on the spot.
- djoldman 2y agoWow it's actually a verbatim quote: > In essence, Replit’s latest customer base is a new breed of coder: The ones who don’t know the first thing about code. > “We don’t care about professional coders anymore,” Masad said. > Instead, he says it’s time for non-coders to begin learning how to use AI tools to build software themselves. He is credited with a concept known as “Amjad’s Law” that says the return on learning some code doubles every six months.
- hnthrow90348765 2y agoThese business types only learning enough to prompt an AI will eventually get tired of prodding the AI to fix things, unless Masad here is also selling an AI that will monitor and maintain your infrastructure for you too. They don't even have the patience to listen to developers talk about technical issues in meetings today, they're definitely not cut out for app maintenance work when the technical details start to matter. He is doing the smart thing and selling shovels though, and this statement is part of that sell.
- darth_avocado 2y agoJust a random end of the month $10000000 AWS bill will be enough for the shake the faith in AI writing code.
- earnestinger 2y ago> Instead, he says it’s time for non-coders to begin learning how to use AI tools Seems reasonable that more people will be able to utilise programability of computers. People who already created elaborate spreadsheet’s with formulas, now might start also using python/java/go for their benefit. (Eg. Accountant, might start helping with the accounting system maintenance)
- greenthrow 2y agoAnyone who thinks non-engineers can build quality products with just AI doesn't know anything about being an engineer.
- codr7 2y agoWow, won't take long for that perspecitve to sound REALLY fckn stupid. I was actually keeping an eye on the company, but I'm pretty sure now it's not a place where I want to work.
- z0r 2y agoI liked repl.it back when it was an online programming environment in a can. This is the first I've heard of it doing an AI pivot.
- rahtar 2y agoI think the headline statement sounds stronger than intended. In the context it reads like: Professional coders (obviously) do not care about Replit, so we focus on a lower segment.
- 0xCAP 2y agoIt's simply clickbait
- rogerthis 2y agoI feel, cannot substantiate, but I feel today looks like those days of "Model Driven Design", "Model Driven Architecture", UML code generators, WYSIWYG IDEs. Just feeling, just feeling.
- earnestinger 2y agoChagpt, generate quote about history cycles and/or rhyme
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- godelski 2y agoWhat stocks should I invest in to capitalize on the impending security researcher boom?
- ahwelitif 2y agoLLM powered regular people won't be able to replace/undercut developers because they don't know how to correctly gather requirements. The day LLMs start insisting Joe Schmoe non-devs first plan DB schemas/hosting/auth (ie; before responding with random HTML/CSS/JS page demos) is the day I start getting really scared.
- tommy_axle 2y agoYes to gathering requirements but for everything else it might be possible. See Genatron AI
- 8note 2y agothis seeems like a really hard sell. you have to break people out of their current context putting whatever solutions into chatgpt, and then realize that its a coding problem to switch to replit, while not being somebody with the gut sense that thats something you should do.
- purplezooey 2y ago"Yet it has grown its revenue five-fold over the past six months." Yeah, by shutting down Replit for Education and suddenly charging for stuff that used to be free. I guess repl.it is not a charity, but this is a blunt way of raising revenue that a "me too" AI offering may not compensate for.
- jawengnur 2y ago[dead]
- iugtmkbdfil834 2y agoOk. So this is the new version of nocode. The spin is a little bit different, becauase I can tell from personal anecdotes that llms do allow people with almost no experience in a given area to feel confident enough to take steps that only few years ago would cause them to stop rather quickly. In a a sense, there is a real threat to the current demand ( and that is seen across the board already as corporations either suspend hiring or proudly announce 2025 is the year of not hiring devs ), but the agent is still only as good as its operator ( as with most tools ). I am not saying the real breakthrough will not come, because what is being done already is impressive on its own especially when you pair a person that knows what he is doing with LLM.. but for now this iteration of nocode still has one major flaw: humans. And again, executives will need to learn.