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After nine years of grinding, Replit found its market. Can it keep it?
- sincerely 1y ago>Rather than becoming defensive, Masad and his team owned the problem. In fact, says Masad, within two days, they rolled out an automatic safety system that separates a user’s “practice” database from their “real” one. The way Masad describes it, it’s a little like having two versions of a website’s filing cabinet — the AI agent can experiment freely in a development database, but the production database, which is the real thing that users interact with, is completely walled off. I gotta wonder who the median techcrunch reader is if the writer/editor felt it necessary to explain the point of having a staging and prod environment, and with such a pointless analogy. We surely cannot understand what a database is unless we're told it's like a filing cabinet, right?
- jychang 1y agoYou don't write for your median reader, you write for the vast majority of your readers. That's a basic concept of writing. Journalism should be accessible, so even if you know what a database is and how to deploy it in different envs, you shouldn't write assuming that. If a large portion of your readers don't know what you're saying, you've failed as a writer. If your readership includes high school students, you write with that as the baseline. Richard Feynman certainly didn't write as if he assumed the reader knew particle physics. Be like Richard Feynman.
- kortilla 1y agoRichard Feynman didn’t use poor analogies.
- chirau 1y ago'Poor' is subjective. Some might even use it to describe your comment.
- mcherm 1y agoChuck Norris doesn't even NEED analogies. He explains the original problem so hard that you understand it without reference to a similar but more familiar situation. Chuck Norris would probably have mentioned "dev" and "production" and never needed to discuss furniture used for stacking open-faced envelopes for holding papers.
- reactordev 1y agoChuck Norris doesn’t use AI, AI uses Chuck Norris.
- mejutoco 1y agoIf the median has half the users over it and half under it, wouldn’t writing for most of your readers be very close to writing for the median? If we are aiming for 51% (most readers). Most readers is somewhere between 50% and under 100%. I appreciate the idea, but I think there are always assumptions. Like you did not explain what the median is because this is hn. I like the standars of the economist, always saying what an acronym is on first usage, and what a company is (Google, a search company). What they dont do is say: Google, like a box where you enter what you want to find and points you to other boxes. That would be condescending for its readers I believe. It is a matter of taste, and not objective, I guess.
- IanCal 1y agoThat would be writing for most users but barely. I think there’s a fair reason they said “vast majority” instead.
- nkrisc 1y agoI don’t think “vast majority” has a rigid definition, but I’d put it closer to 95% than 51%. For example, in the senate passing with 51 votes is a “simple majority”.
- mejutoco 1y agoI am not sure the post said "vast majority" originally, to be fair. Is there a way to check?
- rkomorn 1y agoThis is all highly personal, so just banter'ing, but: I agree there's no clear definition but 95% is even beyond "overwhelming majority" to me (with overwhelming being greater than vast). I'd call that "near totality". Maybe, at least for US contexts, "vast" should line up with "filibuster-proof"? Eg 60-65%? 75% at most. Of course, then that doesn't tell me anything about what it should mean in other contexts.
- Normal_gaussian 1y ago
- 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 1y agoI'm not sure if any of my coworkers has ever properly used a filing cabinet
- siffin 1y agoSpreadsheet would have been the better analogy.
- 1718627440 1y agoWhich wouldn't be an analogy, because spreadsheet programs can be considered and often are a database.
- sooperserieous 1y ago> Be like Richard Feynman Oh the things he did to filing cabinets, especially "secure" ones...
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- ChadNauseam 1y agoIronically, especially when you combine it with the em-dash, it really sounds like exactly the type of completely pointless and unilluminating analogy that LLMs love to generate. These analogies are essentially a bridge between two concepts, much like how a physical bridge connects two pieces of land separated by water, except in this case the 'water' is understanding and the bridge doesn't actually help you cross it.
- verandaguy 1y agoWell done
- notarobot123 1y agoTo be fair, this was an indirect quote from a founder trying to make programming accessible to "white-collar employees with no technical background". The bigger question here is why prod/staging wasn't an obvious design choice in the first place!
- petre 1y agoMaybe it diverted too many resources from the original goal. They fixed the issue afterwards and made a fuss about it.
- unmole 1y ago> median techcrunch reader Is probably a consumer tech enthusiast and not a software developer.
- layer8 1y agoThey are merely quoting the analogy from Masad — for whom it makes sense if they are targeting nontechnical users and not professional developers anymore.
- recursivecaveat 1y agoIt's kind of a beautiful turn of phrase, in that the filing cabinet is entirely superfluous, you can use almost any noun. "it’s a little like having two versions of a website’s sub sandwich — the AI agent can experiment freely with a development sandwich, but the production sandwich, which is the real thing that users interact with, is completely walled off". "When you click a button on our website, a request is sent across the internet to our servers, it's a little like if a sockeye salmon was sent across the internet to our servers."
- dvrj101 1y ago> Masad and his team owned the problem. he fired half of his team so it really wasn't an option for rest of them team.
- 0xsn3k 1y agopersonally, the evolution of replit makes me sad. i remember writing some of my very first ever programs in python using replit in middle school, as it wasn't blocked by the school network and it was the best way of running arbitrary code online back then. i used it to execute java code for AP computer science in high school, and i improved a ton at using the terminal as well. At some point, I stopped using the replit web editor and was coding by full-screening the built-in terminal and using vim. it was a formative experience and really helped me develop as a programmer even though all i had access to was a locked-down chromebook. but now, going back to the website and seeing the first thing it shows to you is how you can "build apps using AI", not even being able to even create an environment to run some python code without talking to an LLM, and the company focusing on ARR and becoming "AI-native" and creating value and all that jazz, and it feels like the magic of learning to code for the first time has been lost. luckily, kids these days are spoiled with webassembly and can run pretty much whatever they want in the browser, so i'm sure the next generation of young programmers will be alright
- brazukadev 1y agoYou should be grateful and happy for the people that helped you in your journey, they made it! You know, apps are not AI (yet), what you used for free was built by someone that deserves the success.
- reactordev 1y agoBut that’s true of everything we use. Someone made that fork you use. That plate. The shoes you wear. Same for an app. You don’t deserve anything. If you make something, and release it into the world, you have a responsibility. Not a reward. A reward may come. People may pay you for your services or your novelty but in no way shape or form are you deserving of it. Deserving of something is a 3rd person observation. You can not demand that you deserve anything.
- brazukadev 1y ago> But that’s true of everything we use. Someone made that fork you use I paid a fair price for my forks and plates and shoes, I don't need to be grateful for that. Using a platform for free and then complaining that now they focus on making money is not the same. > Deserving of something is a 3rd person observation. You can not demand that you deserve anything. I'm not OP nor Replit owner.
- freetonik 1y agoI've used Replit for educational materials when teaching beginners Python and JavaScript. They had a nice product called Teams for Education. It was even announced that it'll become fully free (the original blog post with the announcement was deleted from their website) [0], but soon after that the company had pivoted to AI and later discontinued the Teams for Education completely [1]. I also used Replit's embedded widgets for occasional lessons, but they kept changing the UI and behavior, making it difficult to write consistent reliable documentation for beginners. I think by now it's clear that the product is not meant for educators, like it was originally, so that's ok. [0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20240924020257/https://blog.replit.com/teamsforedu_free https://web.archive.org/web/20240924020257/https://blog.repl... [1]: https://blog.replit.com/update-on-teams-for-education https://blog.replit.com/update-on-teams-for-education
- vesterde 1y agoOh you brought back fond memories of using the very first education product Replit had. It was so good. I was teaching GCSE CS and having a blast giving kids python with turtle to play with. I would just give them some multicoloured octagon and more complex shape, and they had to draw it with turtle. They enjoyed it, I enjoyed it, and the teacher UX was great.
- gerdesj 1y agoLibre Office has a Logo implementation built in. You can have turtles whizzing around your documents and spreadsheets.
- jackblemming 1y agoSounds like these guys kind of flailed around for almost a decade and then jumped on the AI bandwagon. Nothing wrong with that, I’m just surprised someone decided to bankroll them for so long. Also not sure how successful they’ll be long term, since they’re presumably a wrapper around one of the big three in a highly competitive space.
- mcherm 1y ago> I’m just surprised someone decided to bankroll them for so long. When you are PROFITABLE (but not as profitable as your investors would like) you can run FOREVER without anyone "bankrolling" you. It's a foreign concept in the AI world (and sometimes it feels like it's foreign to the tech startup world) but quite effective.
- maxbond 1y agoEven if you are profitable your investors could pressure you to exit to some other company so that they can recoup their investment. But I doubt they were profitable. Going by the article they had about 100 employees and about $2M in revenue before they downsized. Assuming a median salary of $100k that would put their payroll alone at $10M. But the napkin math is kinda beside the point because they did keep raising money [1]. [1] https://pitchbook.com/profiles/company/113831-02 https://pitchbook.com/profiles/company/113831-02
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- LudwigNagasena 1y agoMaybe $100k gets you one fresh grad in Bay Area but outside of OECD countries it may get you several middle engineers. I bet most startups outsource their development after the first few core developers.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- josefrichter 1y agoI don't think they can keep it. What they have has already been replicated by the big guys, with just maybe a few months delay. It seems like they're usually going in the right direction, even ahead of others, but it's usually not any massive breakthrough, they're just being good at executing quickly the natural next steps.
- Perenti 1y agoI've seen bots promoting Replit on Steam forums of indie games. If this is the way they are marketing their product, I don't see it as having a future. What I've seen in the Dwarf Fortress forums alone makes me want to avoid the company with a 10' pole.
- nurettin 1y agoLet us not forget how replit tried to cancel Riju (an open source project from one of the early devs which does something similar) Edit: looks like they succeeded or the author moved on
- Jtsummers 1y agohttps://radian.statuspage.io/ https://radian.statuspage.io/ It's still up, it only supports IPv6 so that may be why you can't get to it.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- JimmyAustin 1y agoHey, Replit employee here. I'm pretty sure this isn't us (definitely isn't our marketing team's MO AFAIK). Can you email me some examples at james @ replit dot com so I can look into this?
- Kiro 1y agoI find exactly one post about Replit in the DF Steam forums and it's definitely not from a bot account. Players who have just discovered vibe coding love to tell devs "just" to use something like they've been enlightened.
- speff 1y agoI found two, but it looks like the topic was deleted. Kagi had it partially cached as a search result[0]. The first thread in that list seems a bit more ...pushy than the second thread. Though I think you're still right - was probably just a new coder who was excited about what they found. [0]: https://files.catbox.moe/oepmri.png https://files.catbox.moe/oepmri.png
- rsp1984 1y agoLet's not forget this gem here [1]. Tells you everything you need to know about the company and its leadership. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27424195 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27424195
- jeswin 1y agoHe threatened the ex-intern by saying they have "a lot of money to pay for top lawyers" (goodness!), the incident gathered a lot of attention, got caught, and was forced to say sorry. Replit is in the news because of the Vercel fiasco. And it's jarring because of how they've tried to take advantage of that situation.
- redwood 1y agoVercel fiasco?
- dabeeeenster 1y agoThe CEO thought it a good idea to take a beaming selfie with Netenyahu and then post it to X
- redwood 1y agoGot it. I was going to say it sounds like less than a fiasco but I see this is in context of someone criticizing the Replit CEO for a specific action so now I get it. Apologies for being dense. It's a reminder that people leading companies are just people. And if we have a purity test on everyone we better be prepared to have a purity test on ourselves. And not just in our own eyes but in the eyes of everyone else. And that's where it quickly falls apart.
- wiseowise 1y ago[flagged]
- hu3 1y agoSad to see https://riju.codes https://riju.codes offline. Cant resolve DNS. Last push to main was 2 months ago so there's hope: https://github.com/radian-software/riju https://github.com/radian-software/riju
- pengfeituan 1y agoThey are working at a too competitive area. Techs changed, and everything should re-start from scratch. Nine years may mean nothing at all.
- MangoToupe 1y agoWhat, college students with credits who haven't figured out docker yet?
- cloudking 1y agoI took it for a spin spin to build a simple task manager. It worked for 45 minutes, built half the solution and then asked me for money. Compared to the other options in this space, it seems like an expensive solution.
- ctkhn 1y agoIf OpenAI and Anthropic's models are good enough at coding to make coding agents useful for non-technical employees Replit is targeting, why can't either of those companies use their AI to build a wrapper around their product as good or better than Replit? Has this guy never taken n -> infinity in a problem before?
- sillyfluke 1y agoOpenAI taking an interest wouldn't be so bad for Replit. Since YC boasts that being incestuous is an upside of YC, ie selling your product to other YC companies, it is possible that OpenAI does the decent thing an outright buys Replit. It is rather likely that Altman and Masad have some sort of relationship going back to their YC days.
- CuriouslyC 1y agoReplit has a lot of "value" that's actually dead weight that's going to fall by the wayside as AI gets better and humans move out of the loop. Cursor and the IDE agent companies have the same problem. They need to cannibalize their products to build for the fully autonomous engineering future, but I'm 95% certain that they won't, and the business that DO focus on full automation and moving the human out of the loop will eat their lunch.
- ctkhn 1y agoWhy would OpenAI buy Replit? My point is, if Sam's model is so great and advanced, it should be able to autonomously code a replacement. Or Cursor, or any of the others.
- kubb 1y agoThe funding round is all that matters. Now he can pay himself 15 million per year plus a severance package and he’s made it.
- ares623 1y agoBingo. Us plebs are busy thinking about long term plans.
- Pet_Ant 1y agoIs miss repl.it for what it used to be, just a quick way to play with a bit of code.
- VBprogrammer 1y agoWe used to use it for coding interviews during COVID. It never struck me as anything special and I'm not convinced saddling it with AI improvements it's prospects. In fact it might make them worse given it's general applicability to learning which will surely be surpressed by the worries of an AI takeover.
- laweijfmvo 1y agoSame, but that doesn’t justify half a billion dollars in investment.
- system2 1y agoI don't understand the appeal of Replit. Claude and other agents do what they do for much cheaper and efficiently. Is it for newcomers who don't know anything about software development, nd Replit fills the gap with basic user instructions and structure? Why is it even a thing while real agents are there?
- gcr 1y agoReplit's original value proposition was on-demand sandboxed environments. With Claude, it's like you're handing YOUR laptop's terminal to an intern. With Replit, you can mess things up without consequences, which is a great help for newbies.
- system2 1y agoWSL + local Git? Don't people use it to sandbox their applications and create necessary branches without losing their minds?
- fredfsh 1y ago> But the technical achievement wasn’t translating into revenue growth, and by last year, with the company at 130 employees and burning through cash, Masad said he had to make a painful decision. “I looked at our burn, and I looked at our progress on our revenue chart, and it just didn’t make any sense. The business wasn’t viable.” Replit cut its headcount by 50%, bringing it down to around 60 to 70 people at its lowest point. > Plus, Replit has another unusual advantage for a startup: a $350 million war chest. Despite raising $100 million in 2023, the company “hadn’t touched” those funds by the time it raised this latest round, Masad told me. The company is capital efficient by design, though Masad joked that as an entrepreneur who grew up watching his refugee father struggle, “one thing I need to learn is to be less frugal and start spending money.”
- HDThoreaun 1y agoIts a business, not a charity. Just because they have money doesnt mean they should spend on people who arent contributing to the bottom line.
- SadTrombone 1y agoWhat information do you have that they weren't contributing to the bottom line?
- davikr 1y agopersonally, I hate the AI pivot. could barely find a way to make a project without the vibecoding option, recently
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- bitwize 1y agoPivoting to AI made Repl.it worse but Warp.dev better.
- sporkxrocket 1y agoAmjad is one of the only leaders in tech (along with Paul Graham) speaking out against Israel's apartheid and genocide. He also happens to be Palestinian. I will happily give him my money and invest in ethical platforms. Replit's a really good option for AI coding anyway!
- Cyclone_ 1y agoI've used it for creating a template for an app. It usually creates a pretty accurate app with at least a basic UI and some interactions. The biggest issue is that once you've created the template, it's pretty tough to add some more complicated features using the AI.
- markdown 1y agoThis has been my experience also. You gotta give it detailed instructions for everything at the start. You can't just build as you go, because every time it adds something it breaks something else.
- joshdavham 1y agoI've never used replit but I'm curious what types of choices the app makes when building. Like how does it decide on the architecture, backend language, frontend framework, etc? Even if the non-technical user is unaware of the tech choices being made, the AI still has to make such decisions. How does it decide?
- taejavu 1y agoIt just starts and makes it up as it goes.
- _heimdall 1y agoOne token at a time. If it has detailed context of exactly what the entire app will need to do before writing any code, the first tokens will be more likely to build an architecture that works well in a language and framework that is suited for it. If the initial context is thin on details, it will still pick an architecture, language, and framework but it may not be the best fit for the end goal. After those choices are made that just becomes more context, and it likely would never consider whether the language is now wrong and the entire codebase should be started fresh with a new language or framework.
- apwell23 1y ago> because every time it adds something it breaks something else. standard ai workflow
- saltyoldman 1y ago"Replit found its market" HN: It sucks now
- Imustaskforhelp 1y agomaybe HN isn't the market then :p
- nextworddev 1y agoI tried their pro version then cancelled after realizing it’s worse than Claude Code
- sergiotapia 1y agoToo much money for a business that really won't find a way to justify the investment. Could have been a terrific lifestyle business and become extremely successful.
- submeta 1y agoThere is no future for Replit considering how Anthropic, OpenAI and Google are moving into dev tools. And then there‘s Cursor and the likes. As an online IDE they would have had a chance. But when they pivoted into AI, they decided to enter a highly crowded place with very strong players. Recently OpenAI and now Anthropic are developing mobile clients as well: https://www.testingcatalog.com/anthropic-prepares-claude-code-release-for-mobile-apps/ https://www.testingcatalog.com/anthropic-prepares-claude-cod...
- chrismustcode 1y agoThey were failing as an online IDE for several years then growth shot up after the AI pivot.
- CuriouslyC 1y agoCursor is in the same lifeboat being circled by sharks as Replit. What value does teaching noobs how to code or showing changes in an IDE have when the AI is smarter than humans and human in the loop just slows things down and makes them worse?
- vasco 1y agoThis guy is exactly like the get quick rich scheme guys. I believe he initially had a vision for the product but now the whole schpiel is quotes like "a kid made $180k on an app in 4 weeks" like he was on and on about in podcasts. Ok if its so easy, why don't you use your own website to do a bunch of $180k / m apps? How many companies can have employees produce 12 different apps per year and a combined revenue of $2.1m per employee? Also everyone can do it so you can pay them minimum wage you don't need developers. But of course nobody is going to make any successful apps other than the people in the marketing materials.
- psnehanshu 1y agoWhen I hear Replit, I remember how the CEO tried to kill an intern's pet project. https://intuitiveexplanations.com/tech/replit/ https://intuitiveexplanations.com/tech/replit/
- bigcat12345678 1y agoI am surprised the CEO does not understand the dynamic of his business. An open source project replicating your product is always a boost to the business. There is no case where that's not the case. The OSS is essentially the minatenance free free tier of the paid product.
- BoorishBears 1y agoI went to a YC event where the founder of a multi-billion dollar open source SaaS said pretty much the opposite and tried to drill home how strategic the choice needs to be for the company to survive.
- Aeolun 1y agoThis must be Gitlab?
- CuriouslyC 1y agoNah, their moat is making the software as fiddly and ops heavy as possible. I really like gitlab but having set it up myself several times now, it's kinda a mess and they're not incentivized to make it decent.
- aidos 1y agoTo play devil’s advocate - where do you draw the line? They say they’re not going to push further into competing, but what if they did? I don’t know enough about either platform to really comment on how much of a big it is / how much they crossover. I do feel that it shows somewhat bad judgement on behalf of the intern to build something in exactly the same space as a former employer. One of the great things about software is that you can always move into another domain with your skills. Obviously, I love the likes of Tailscale for embracing and supporting this behaviour - but that’s super exceptional (because they’re a strong team).
- black_13 1y ago[dead]
- stefvw93 1y ago> […] unlike many AI-powered coding companies, Replit is gross margin positive. Well, that’s highly unusual. I recon it is because replit covers the whole production pipeline, from specification to implementation to deployment?
- JDazzle 1y agoIt's strange that their buzzwords are "to democratize programming"... isn't that already done very well with all the online free tools, documentation, tutorials, learning paths, etc? Both AI and traditional programming paths share the same initial huge obstacle which is full access to a computer and the internet? I'm not sure how AI is democratizing programming
- Mario970 1y agoYou need to read between the lines: in boardroom speak, to "democratize" something usually means to dilute its rarity, usually to eliminate some party's bargaining power.
- tracerbulletx 1y agoPretty much every company that says that eventually ends up spending 100% of the time catering to and trying to sign enterprises, and actively disdains supporting individual customers.