← Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
Behind the product: Replit | Amjad Masad (co-founder and CEO)
01:04:08
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- [00:00]
Amjad Massad
The idea behind Replit is that making software today is very difficult. We want to make it easier. People view this as a developer in their pocket. Essentially we have 34 million users globally. There's people everywhere learning to code on replit, building startups, building personal software, personal.
- [00:20]
Lenny Rachitsky
Tools for people building products, say product managers, founders. Like what skills do you see will matter more, matter less.
- [00:27]
Amjad Massad
Typically you're bottlenecked where your ideas are not fitting in because like they need to made and they need to be made quickly. Now you open up that bottleneck. So now like actually making things is a lot easier. Actually you become limited by how fast you can generate ideas.
- [00:44]
Lenny Rachitsky
I think people are unaware of just how far things have gone.
- [00:47]
Amjad Massad
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 building and creating this thing, man.
- [01:01]
Lenny Rachitsky
The future is.
- [01:04]
Amjad Massad
Foreign.
- [01:10]
Lenny Rachitsky
Massad 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 going to operate, which functions will be more and less valuable over time. 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 going to do an experiment with this podcast where I'm going to 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. In our conversation. Amjad does a demo of what you can do with Replit today, which is going to 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. 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. With that, I bring you Amjad Massad. Amjad, thank you so much for being here. Welcome to the podcast.
- [02:46]
Amjad Massad
It's my pleasure.
- [02:47]
Lenny Rachitsky
I thought it'd be great to start with just having you explain what is replit, what's the vision, what's. Where is this going, what job does it do for people?
- [02:56]
Amjad Massad
The idea behind replit is that making software today is very difficult and we want to make it easier. One of the reasons for the difficulty is that it is very fragmented. So you would need to download what's called an ide. It's basically a code editor. You need to download the runtime, Basically Python or JavaScript. You need to figure out a package manager to configure your 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 to. And so it's a very hard process and that's one of the ways where people get stuck and never learn how to code because it just feels like this cumbersome IT process. And so the vision for replit has always been is like, okay, making software is fun, is great, more people should do it. So for more people to do it, it needs to be easier to do. It needs to be in one place and it needs to be learnable. It's easy to learn. So that's the product today. It is, I think, one of the more easier IDEs Environment Deployment Environment on the Internet. 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.
- [04:22]
Lenny Rachitsky
This episode is brought to you by work OS. If you're building a SaaS app, at some point your customers will start asking for enterprise features like SAML authentication and skim provisioning. That's where work OS comes in, making it fast and painless to add enterprise features to your app. Their APIs are easy to understand so that you can ship quickly and get back to building other features. Today, hundreds of companies are already powered by WorkOS, including ones you probably know like Vercel, Webflow and Loom WorkOS. Also recently acquired Warrant, the fine grain authorization service. Warrant's product is based on a groundbreaking authorization system called Zanzibar, which was originally designed for Google Google to power Google Docs and YouTube. This enables fast authorization checks at enormous scale while maintaining a flexible model that can be adapted to even the most complex use cases. If you're currently looking to build role based access control or other enterprise Features like single sign on, SCIM or user management. You should consider Workos. It's a drop in replacement for auth0 and supports up to 1 million monthly active users for free. Check it out at workos.com to learn more. That's workos.com this episode is brought to you by Persona, the adaptable identity platform that helps businesses fight fraud, meet compliance requirements and build trust. While you're listening to this right now, how do you know that you're really listening to me? Lenny these days it's easier than ever for fraudsters to steal PII faces and identities. That's where Persona comes in. Persona helps leading companies like LinkedIn, Etsy and Twilio securely verify individuals and businesses across the world. What sets Persona apart is its configurability. Every company has different needs depending on its industry, use cases, risk tolerance and user demographics. That's why Persona offers flexible building blocks that allow you to build tailored collection and verification flows that maximize conversion while minimizing risk. Plus, Persona's orchestration tools automate your identity process so that you can fight rapidly shifting fraud and meet new waves of regulation. Whether you're a startup or an enterprise business, Persona has a plan for you. Learn more@withpersona.com Lenny Again, that's with P E R-S-O-N A.com Lenny what's the scale of repl at this point? How large has this gotten? How many people are using it?
- [06:56]
Amjad Massad
We have 34 million users globally. We have a large global presence. There's people everywhere learning to code on replit, building startups, building personal software, personal tools or internal tools of companies. More recently we've been expanding to companies. We released our kind of B2B package in July and that's been growing really fast. It's been really fun to see people bring Replit to work as well.
- [07:26]
Lenny Rachitsky
Damn, I knew it was popular. I didn't realize it was that large. Actually, as I was preparing for this podcast episode, there's this tweet that kind of that went viral where this guy Jevin, who I actually know, I know this guy from Canada, he's awesome. Tweeted about how his 11 year old girl built an app in Replit. She just had an idea and she built it. And the best part of it is someone in the like replied to him and they're like, you have to launch an app, you have to host it somewhere, you have to build a database, you have to deploy it. There's no way to that. And he's like, no, that's exactly what Replit did.
- [08:00]
Amjad Massad
Yeah, that's what we do. Everything that commenter was talking about and he's right. The surprising thing about an 11 year old building an app, it's not so much even the coding, it is like all the nonsense around it. And so we just abstract all that away.
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Lenny Rachitsky
I love that. And I struggled with that myself and I was an engineer way back in the day.
- [08:24]
Amjad Massad
Oh, you were an engineer?
- [08:25]
Lenny Rachitsky
I didn't know that I was, I was an engineer for 10 years. I was an engineering manager and then I jumped ship into product and wow, I'm happy I did. But I do miss that. 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 loved to use. So we're going to jump into a demo of what this actually looks like. I thought maybe actually before we get into it, 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.
- [09:05]
Amjad Massad
Again we go go back to this idea of like end to end platform for making software. So that's like from writing code all the way to deploying it and monetizing it and all of that. Now every step in the process of the software development life cycle there are a lot of different tools. So Cursor is a fork of VS code that's made that has really awesome AI tools. But that's an editor. You still need runtime, you still need a deployment environment. Actually quite a few users use Cursor in tandem with Replit because Replit just simplifies the runtime and deployment environment. And so you have products, you know, AI products, different places in the software development life cycle. But really what differentiates Relet is that we, we do everything. But also that makes it harder to adopt for certain people. Like if you're at a big company, it's very easy to bring a new editor and start coding with that. It's quite hard to bring something that's quite opinionated about everything from how the code runs to how the code deploys. But that's the trade off we're willing to make is like yeah, we're not going to get into the enterprise main software development pipeline, but we want to empower everyone to be able to build software. And that means product managers, designers, we have operations people, sales ops, HR ops, we have lawyers using Replit. And so it is democratizing the active software, software engineering.
- [10:50]
Lenny Rachitsky
Amazing. And that's why you're here. Let's do a demo. While you're pulling it up, you're going to 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 they can do. I feel like there's so much talk about AI and what it's doing and people keep reading about, oh, AI can do this and AI 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 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 going to impact the future of product management and product teams. So I'll turn it over to you. Give us a demo.
- [11:37]
Amjad Massad
Awesome. So this is replit's homepage. You can create what's called a repl, which is a project. We have all sorts of languages you can pick from, really in the hundreds. But most recently, and this is how repl it 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 and you can write something like make me a cool app or what have you, but you know, a more descriptive prompt is better. And so I asked RPM at Replit, Aman Mathur, who's a fan of the show, to tell me what PMs like to build. And so he came up with a prompt. He kind of really crafted a great prompt. So I'm going to put it here. And basically what we're asking for is we want to build a web application. You can, you can say what stack you want to use or you can leave it up to the AI to decide. Here we're saying build it in Node JS for product managers to track feature requests on a public dashboard. So say, 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. We're talking here about the features upvoting System feature requests, read a few of.
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Lenny Rachitsky
Them just for folks that aren't watching on YouTube. You give them a sense of some of this, some of the stuff in this prompt.
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Amjad Massad
So a feature request submission so allowing the users to add features up. Voting system so allowing users to upvote these features. Feature requests and status tracking being able to. It's like a Kanban 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 prompty things and then admin controls for product manager. So you know, as a product manager I want to be able to kind of really manage this community.
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Lenny Rachitsky
I love that it builds internal tools too, not just the front end.
- [13:47]
Amjad Massad
Exactly, exactly. All right, so we're going to start building. Since this is a pretty big prompt, the initial coding might take a while. There's different styles of using grappler agents. I often go with minimalist prompts. That's also how I code as well. I have a vague idea of what I want to build and iterate from there. Other people, product managers like to write PRDs and more descriptive things and you can do either of those things. The AI now responded and said I'll build all of that for you. I'm going to build up the initial prototype and you can tell me how it feels and then we can make it better from there. The AI is also suggesting adding comment threads, implementing email notifications and so I can select those. And it's being creative, it's telling me what else I could build. But for now I'm just going to 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 pane 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. So 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 database schema, now it's building the homepage and it's actually quite fun and edifying to watch it build us because you can really start to learn how to structure web apps and if it runs into a problem and as things get complicated it might run into a problem and you want to be able to 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 lot of people just don't care about the code and are still able to build things, but we want to make the process transparent. We want to show people exactly what the agent is doing.
- [15:57]
Lenny Rachitsky
You're basically sitting there behind an engineer on a computer and just watching them code is what the experience feels like.
- [16:04]
Amjad Massad
Yeah, and actually the way we built it is like it's a multiplayer system. So Replit is, you know, has real time, what we call multiplayer coding. And we reused this, the multiplayer system, to build the agent. So the agent in the code is structured as a another user of the platform. So basically we're both coding together. So I can go into the files here. And that's the thing that makes Replit really cool. I think people are familiar with some of the more like chat interfaces.
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Lenny Rachitsky
Like.
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Amjad Massad
V0 and others where it's purely chat, but this is like a full IDE where you can like go and look at the files and edit them yourself or ask, ask the AI for an explanation.
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Lenny Rachitsky
What's kind of the limitation of 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?
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Amjad Massad
You know, you can build 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, you might run into problems. For example, you know, it's not very good at data database migrations and so we're trying to fix that. So, you know, a lot of when you're iterating on the product, a lot of the times you're actually changing the structure of the app and that requires database migrations. And so now it might change the database in a way that creates an error that's unrecoverable. And at that point you might get stuck, especially if you don't know how to code. Some people will figure it out by going to ChatGPT and Claude and like asking questions and, and like I actually, I'm really inspired by how persistent some of our users are, which is really amazing. But I think, yeah, that's like you'll get an MVP past the mvp where it's like a product that's working and you need to change and iterate on it. It's still a struggle now, but I Expect, you know, over the next few months, we'll. Will continue. It's like, if you think about it, it's like sort of we're building, you know, we're building as you're building. So we're building out the agent so that it can continue getting better as our users are also building their applications.
- [18:40]
Lenny Rachitsky
Got it. So what I'm hearing is it's really good at building, like, the first version and 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.
- [18:55]
Amjad Massad
Yes.
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Lenny Rachitsky
But you can get in there if you have. If you know how to code and take it from there, right? Yes.
- [19:01]
Amjad Massad
Or you can hire someone. We have a feature on the site called Bounties where you can hire human coders to kind of help you finish your finish.
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Lenny Rachitsky
That's going to be the. Our job for humans for, like, that'll remain for a while.
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Amjad Massad
You know what we want to do? We want to get to a point where the agent can go grab a human when it runs into a problem. I think that would be sick.
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Lenny Rachitsky
Oh, my God. It's like everything's reversed. I love it. Oh, look, I think it might be done. Check that out.
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Amjad Massad
Yeah. So now the agent is asking us, is the application running and showing the homepage?
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Lenny Rachitsky
Hmm, I like that.
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Amjad Massad
It's confirming, like, yeah, Almost asking us to do qa. I'll just say yes. So it found an error. So there's an error here. And it's like there's a DOM warning. I'm going to fix it. So in the meantime, as it's fixing it, so you know it can be proactive. Right. Because it, you know, it looks at all the errors and things like that, but in the meantime, we can use it. I just created an account. Oh, it's. It's coding. Okay.
- [20:13]
Lenny Rachitsky
It's fixing the bug. That's cool.
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Amjad Massad
Yeah. Restart. Okay, well, we'll wait for it.
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Lenny Rachitsky
How long would you say it would take an engineer to build this? Like a, you know, like a typical engineer?
- [20:23]
Amjad Massad
A few days, I would say. To a week. I mean, if you're really good at. It might be hours, but. But, you know, it probably would take me a few days. I would say I'm like a decent engineer. It'll take me a few days.
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Lenny Rachitsky
Yeah. It took how much? Like five, ten minutes?
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Amjad Massad
Yeah. And it probably, like, cost us something in the sense.
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Lenny Rachitsky
Wow. In terms of compute.
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Amjad Massad
Yeah, in terms of compute, yeah. Like, probably, you Know, I would estimate it at like 15 cents or something like that.
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Lenny Rachitsky
Wow.
- [21:00]
Amjad Massad
Okay, so here it is, Here it is. And the agent was like, okay, this is looking good. Completed it. If you want to deploy, deploy it. But I'm like, okay, I'm going to test at first.
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Lenny Rachitsky
And so currently it's living just locally on your local host.
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Amjad Massad
Yeah, it's not, it's. Yeah, it's not local host, it's on roughload.
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Lenny Rachitsky
But.
- [21:16]
Amjad Massad
But yes, it's. It's the equivalent of local host. Yes. Because it's really easy. I can even invite you to this session and you, I can. You can be here with me. And so it's. It's all online.
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Lenny Rachitsky
Got it.
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Amjad Massad
So let's submit a feature. So make the product prettier. That's what a typical user might say. So we have this here. You can upvote it. I guess I can't upload it because I'm the user that created it. But if created another user, you can upvote it. But now we need to be able to move things around as the admin. So I don't know how to log into the admin panel, so I'm going to ask the agent, how do I log in to the admin panel panel. So it might have already built the feature and it's not exposed in the right way. It'll. It'll be able to.
- [22:08]
Lenny Rachitsky
What I love about just like watching you interact with this thing and just real quick all throughout, it feels like an engineer like that is behind the scenes building this thing like on Slack. And you're just talking to them. They built this thing. They're like, I'm draw, check this out, I'm done. And you're like, oh, okay, how about how do I log into this admin panel? And they're like, okay, here you go.
- [22:27]
Amjad Massad
Yeah, so it says, would you like me to help you register account? So it's creating an admin account for me. So it not only builds things, it also maintains things. Right. So in this case, it's actually doing SQL queries. It's not writing code to create an admin account for us.
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Lenny Rachitsky
It's insane. I want to talk about the implications of this on product development and product management and founders. But just like what we just witnessed is somebody. I know you do have technical abilities, but someone that didn't have to have any technical skill. Build like a real product that people can use, like in five minutes that looks good and works. And you could keep making it better by talking to this agent.
- [23:17]
Amjad Massad
Well, I'LL tell you from our experience like what we're seeing. Like, you know, there's so many products that are empowering developers. Like it's a very easy calculation to say we're going to make engineers 20% better and we're going to like sell it to companies and we're going to, you know, take 10% of that value. Right? Like that's why there's so many startups now that are just trying to make engineers a little better. Our calculation is like, well what if you made everyone developer? What does that look like? And so when we released Agent and really made programming a lot easier, what we're seeing is that people, exactly like you said, people view this as a developer in their pocket. Essentially what we're hearing from customers is that I'm doing things I would otherwise have to go hire a developer. But also because the activation energy is lower than going to hire a developer, whether upwork or other places, I'm building a lot more ideas that otherwise I wouldn't have built. So it is, I think, what's it called, the Javelins paradox or something like that, which is when the cost of things go down, the total consumption of it goes up, which is, I'm not sure why they call it a paradox but you know, the cost of electricity goes down, maybe you would expect that, you know, the, the spend, the total spend goes down but actually total spend goes up because people consume more of it. And so I think that's going to be the case of software. Like as the costs go down people will just like make a lot more software to improve their lives and to improve their work and, and start more startups and all of that.
- [25:05]
Lenny Rachitsky
So to follow that thread, what are you seeing inside of startups or even big companies in terms of how folks are already using this, knowing this is like the worst it will be and it will only become smarter and better.
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Amjad Massad
Right.
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Lenny Rachitsky
These days how are people actually using this, say that are say product managers or just like non technical people within startups or bigger companies.
- [25:26]
Amjad Massad
On the SMB side of things, a lot of people are building kind of back office tools, right? So we have real estate agents that you know, have a lot of data, have a lot of things they, they want to manage in their business so that they're 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 SaaS. 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 things like that. And then when you go to the bigger companies, it's anywhere from prototyping to actually production apps to tools as well. So we've seen product managers build like I said, like a V1 of an app and actually go out and test it with users. And I can't name the company but know I, it's a, you know there's a public company that, that have used Replit to test a V1 of A of of an app. And obviously after, after that sort of works, they, they take it to the engineers and they're like, okay, we built this thing, we think it's, we think it's a great thing. We tested with some users, let's go actually put it on the roadmap and, and build it and build it into the actual product. So you are sort of unblocking product managers from having to need engineers for everything that they want to build. So they can really build the v0 or v1 of the product and that's super empowering for them. We saw it also with like marketing departments like Spot Hero has a marketing head of marketing that actually can code decently well but use Replit to build those apps. And they built like a competitive analysis application that looks at competitors pricing and makes sure that they are benchmarked correctly. And so it's a full stack app, use database and everything. And it runs on a continuous fashion. And we see sales engineers use Replit to spin up prototypes really quickly. So actually someone at X, formerly Twitter, is on the sort of partner engineering side of things and he uses Replit agent to spin up applications and prototypes for customers to see how they can use the AX API.
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Lenny Rachitsky
I love this. I love these examples by the way. The demo, is there anything else you want to share about the demo before we close that out?
- [28:14]
Amjad Massad
So it created an admin account. We can ask it with the username password and kind of go into it and manage it. But basically that's it. The app is complete in terms of what we asked for. We can send it out, I can give you a URL. Let's actually just deploy it really quickly to show people.
- [28:35]
Lenny Rachitsky
Maybe in the show notes we'll link to the app, you could check it out.
- [28:38]
Amjad Massad
Sounds good.
- [28:39]
Lenny Rachitsky
Okay, cool. That's amazing. So this is deploying it onto some cloud provider. I don't know what you use, but.
- [28:45]
Amjad Massad
We use Google Cloud.
- [28:45]
Lenny Rachitsky
Okay.
- [28:46]
Amjad Massad
So we abstract all of that away from you. But we use Google Cloud behind the scenes.
- [28:52]
Lenny Rachitsky
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- [30:26]
Amjad Massad
That yeah, for sure. First of all, it's all the abstractions that we built. So the way replit works is at the very bottom layer. It's our runtime. So this is the operating system, this is the package manager, this is the language runtimes. We built a system that is able to install packages in any language, including native packages. So the AI anytime it needs a package, I can go here and show one of those. By the way, the AI can take screenshots as well so that it checks it works. So here you can see it's taking screenshots to make sure that the homepage is rendering. Here you can see it wanted to drag and drop library and so it installed that. And so it has access to all the packages across all languages, including Linux and all of that. And then the layer on top of that is the editor and the infrastructure that runs the editor, including what I described as the multiplayer editor. And Then we expose all of that infrastructure to the AI and there's almost like a new discipline called AI computer interfaces. So sort of like HCI is now ACI and turns out like LLMs need interfaces that are actually quite different than humans. 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 this images and video. So instead we, you know, for the shell for example, we give it a, you know, a sort of a text representation of what the shell is doing at a certain increments for package installation, we give it a certain tool for editing, we give it an editor tool that when it's writing the code it's getting feedback on whether there are errors or not, similar to what a human sees. But it's actually old text just to make it easier. So that's AI computer interface and obviously all of that's sitting on foundation models. So the improvement in foundation models has allowed us to, to build this. The most important model that we use is the Sonnet model from Claude from Anthropic and it is the best model at coding. So that's the model we use for coding. But we use models from OpenAI as well because it's a multi agent system. And so we have models that are critiquing, we have manager, editor model and we have critique model and different models will have different powers. We also train some of our models like the embedding model for search is something we trained internally. So I actually wrote about it back in 22. I said it's going to be society of models, like products will be made of a lot of different models and it's quite a heavy engineering project to say the least.
- [33:49]
Lenny Rachitsky
We were talking offline and you said you've been working on this since 2009 when you first built the first idea of replit, is that right?
- [33:57]
Amjad Massad
Yes.
- [33:57]
Lenny Rachitsky
Oh my God.
- [33:58]
Amjad Massad
Here's the deployed app. I can send it to you and you can use it. You can see 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.
- [34:14]
Lenny Rachitsky
Like this looks like a product. I could see designers spending like days, you know, designing, passing it to engineering PMs, you know, having feedback, engineers taking a few days to build it.
- [34:26]
Amjad Massad
Yes.
- [34:27]
Lenny Rachitsky
And here is just a prompt. Here's what I want.
- [34:30]
Amjad Massad
That's right, that's right. And we can iterate on it very easily. We can also Iterate on the ui. We can, we can say, you know, I don't like this or that, and it'll, it'll 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 it'll just do the right thing.
- [34:47]
Lenny Rachitsky
And it builds from that code base. It understands, here's what you've built. I want to add this thing.
- [34:52]
Amjad Massad
Yes.
- [34:53]
Lenny Rachitsky
Okay.
- [34:53]
Amjad Massad
And that becomes your, sort of your history. Right. Like this was the V1 and now I'm working on this new feature. And you know, and you know, 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 as well. And so we're trying to make it so that, yes, it's for everyone, but we're trying not to abstract too much away. We want to build tools, right. For you to learn to use. And so we want power users to be able to understand the full power of replit. And it's really deep product. I think you can spend a couple of years to kind of master it.
- [35:40]
Lenny Rachitsky
I want to talk about implications, but I want to come back to something you mentioned that is incredible that people may have missed. You basically built 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.
- [35:59]
Amjad Massad
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So you know, there's an entire discipline called like hci, right.
- [36:06]
Lenny Rachitsky
Like it's like even computer interaction.
- [36:08]
Amjad Massad
Yeah. So now there are papers about AI computer interfaces and interactions. And so large language models are trained on large stacks corpus from the Internet. But they're still kind of alien creatures. So they're not like humans. So they have different behaviors and it's unclear, like, what's the best way to give it an editor. So there's so many experimentation about what's the best way to give it a view on what's editing, how many files can you show it before it starts to hallucinate? And right now it's more of an art than science, but it's becoming more and more like a science.
- [36:57]
Lenny Rachitsky
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.
- [37:05]
Amjad Massad
Yes. Here's a computer with a set of tools. Here's a tool to install a package, here's a tool to edit the code Here's a tool to run a SQL query. And also services. Here's a bunch of services you can graph from. Here's a database service, here's an object store service, here's an auth service. So you can think about it as a bunch of external services. The computer with a bunch of tools. And they're all interfacing with the foundation model.
- [37:38]
Lenny Rachitsky
It's funny listening to this, how it starts to feel like the fact that we might be living in a simulation is not as far fetched as it may feel like. This feels like the beginnings of what a simulation computer would be.
- [37:51]
Amjad Massad
Yes, yes, it's, it's pretty like, you know, you can, you can go really sci fi on this and, and it's like where, where is it headed? Right? Like, you know, if we, if we give it enough tools, like let's say you can, I can, I can drop it in Slack and instead of interfacing with it in this fashion, I want to interface with it in a totally autonomous way. So we actually have this feature coming up where, where instead of me testing it, we give it another agent. So here, you know, instead of me interfacing with it and saying, you know, the this is running or not running, we can give it another agent that is actually testing the application. And so, and then let's say I interface with it entirely through Slack and I'll say something like, you know, give me Taylor Swift tickets the moment they land. And so it'll build an app that continuously monitors the web for when Taylor Swift tickets land. And there's like an agent that's using the app to be able to get that. And you can imagine it has some kind of wallet or credit card and then the moment it lands, it kind of gets it. I mean, what I'm trying to say is that software, like agents being able to do software, is how 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]
Lenny Rachitsky
Okay, this can go in so many directions. I'm going to bring us back to the implications for people building products, say product managers, founders. 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.
- [40:00]
Amjad Massad
One interesting Persona that we're seeing is the CEO. The CEO of Startup, the CEO of, you know, Andrew Wilkinson from Tiny, is a big user. And so these people are typically creatives Right. They built a company, they hired people. A lot of them can't code. A lot of them are designers or product managers or something else. And you can imagine a bottleneck. You can imagine a bunch of ideas in their head and the ideas have to translate through them talking and then someone else listening to them and like assuming that someone else actually understands what they say and then that's someone else going and trying to build what they want to 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 what gets me excited is a lot of these CEOs are building the future concept. The next company, the next product they're going to build, the next say company they're going to build. And so it unlocks the creativity and again sort of unblocks them from that. And look, it's, you know, it's a V1 of the product, but it can push things forward. You can touch it, you can feel it, you can say, okay, this really has legs and we should work on it. You give it to your engineers and they can improve on it from there. So that's one Persona, but I'm really excited about it. But the CEO founder in sort of companies. One of the things that I think is sort of hard about tech companies is sort of these silos between designers, product managers and, and engineers. And you know, everyone feels that pain of kind of. We have low bandwidth communication which is, which is language, then text on Slack and zoom calls. And it leads to a lot of frustration because it's really easy to misinterpret people. And again leads to sort of siloing where people working on something and then you pass it on to the next team and it's not really what they expect. That happens a lot between designers and engineers. But like the common language that everyone shares is code, right? Like ultimately, in software tech companies, everything that we're talking about need to eventually flush out in terms of code. And so what if the language becomes actually working prototypes and working applications? For example, we have a Figma extension that translate, you know, FIGMA mocks into, into React, that runs on, on relet. So instead of, instead of, you know, 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, just make sure it runs on our infrastructure. But like, don't mess with it, don't move the Pixels around, right? And so I think it just opens up silos of the companies, make communication around product a lot more concrete because I can give you a working prototype and that'll change how people work. Like if you can imagine that everyone 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 because you know, everyone can be more, more general.
- [44:04]
Lenny Rachitsky
So say you're Pm listening to this, an engineer designer. What skills do you think if you were one of these folks, if you weren't building repl dot right now, what kind of skills would you suggest folks focus on more in which you think are just like, okay, that's going to 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.
- [44:26]
Amjad Massad
I think a very important skill that's like perhaps harder to develop, but it's worth working on is being generative, being more generative, being able to generate new ideas quickly because you know, you can think about it as, as like a factory line, right? Like so, so you have ideas, you have the, the production of, of these, of these ideas or like the initial kind of production of, of these ideas. And then you have, you know, other people that want to consume these ideas or work with you on these, on these ideas. And so 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 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 is a lot easier actually. You become limited by how fast you can generate ideas. And so, and I find that true of, of myself as well. Like, you know, I, I consider myself 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 finding that, well actually I'm running out of ideas sometimes. And so, and so, so you know, training that, that muscle I think is a, is a good thing. I, I think like learning a little bit of coding and like not the traditional way of learning coding. Like when you go, if, like, if you go to like a coding boot camp, they're going to start with like what is git? Actually my co founder Haya was a designer when we're first building Rafflet together, she went to Webassembly to do like a coding course. And the first day they were like, spent this whole time on Git, and she's like, what is that? Like, what does it do? I'm like, I still don't know what Git exactly does, but it's like.
- [46:50]
Lenny Rachitsky
You'Re.
- [46:50]
Amjad Massad
Inverting the process, like you're giving 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 all the tooling. And if you learn a little bit of coding just by, you know, talking to an AI, doing a little bit of debugging, building something with replit, you know, running into a problem and trying to fix it, just using AI, you'll learn a bit of coding. And, you know, I have this, I have this that's been called, not by me, dubbed as Amjad's Law, which is the return on investment for learning to code is doubling every six months. And really just learning a little bit of that skill, learning a bit of skill about how to prompt AI, how to read code and be able to debug it every six months, that's netting you more and more power because you're going to be able to create a lot more. You're going to be able to, it's going to be easier to create. You're going to be able to create a lot more complete things. So that's another skill that I think could be, could be necessary.
- [48:16]
Lenny Rachitsky
This is super interesting. Okay, so this last point you made, Amjad's Law, it's interesting because 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? These agents are building the code. Your point is specific engineering skills are going to be incredibly valuable and more and more. How often are they doubling, would you say?
- [48:39]
Amjad Massad
Every year, you said no, every six months.
- [48:41]
Lenny Rachitsky
Every six months, these specific engineering skills are becoming more valuable. And the idea is this, 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 unblock the agent and understand the mental model of how this stuff is built so that you can move forward fast.
- [48:59]
Amjad Massad
That's right. That's right. Understanding the basic components of it. I would say yes.
- [49:03]
Lenny Rachitsky
So it's like we need new engineering schools to teach you these very Specific skills.
- [49:09]
Amjad Massad
Yes.
- [49:09]
Lenny Rachitsky
Versus spending years on like algorithm algorithms.
- [49:12]
Amjad Massad
And I think, I think no one has done that yet.
- [49:17]
Lenny Rachitsky
Right.
- [49:17]
Amjad Massad
And I think this is, this is like a, you know, big business, probably ready, like to get built. It's like AI native coding. It's totally different than like traditional coding.
- [49:31]
Lenny Rachitsky
Yeah.
- [49:32]
Amjad Massad
That's why on Hacker News, there's so much skepticism about AI native coding tools because they're like, yeah, it's a glorified autocomplete. And I understand, like if you're writing operating system kernels, it's not really doing that much for you, but if you're building product, it's building it for you at this point. Right. And so, you know, if you're starting a school to teach AI native coding, you would skip so much of computer science and the basic tools and you would teach the basic idea of how to structure an app, and then you would teach prompting, and then you would teach, I think, a little bit of debugging. I think debugging is quite a good skill right now to learn.
- [50:22]
Lenny Rachitsky
And interestingly, if you want to be good at debugging bugging, 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. What are servers, what are APIs, all these things. Okay, how far? So we've been talking about how this is very good right now. Building a prototype, building a V1 MVP. People can use it, you can deploy it, you deploy this app, people can start using it and there's like a scale it can reach. Do you see a future where you can build like a salesforce sized business fully replit, or other tools that can scale to hundreds of billions of dollars of value? Or is there just going to always be some limit of like, you need like actual engineers and designers sitting on this thing, building and making it awesome.
- [51:07]
Amjad Massad
If like my law is like, you know, directionally correct, even if the months are not exactly correct, that the duration is correct, you're going to see a compounding effect of the power. It's actually quite hard to convince yourself, but if you really convince yourself that we are on a massive scale of improvement in AI, then the answer is yes. And it's absurd to my engineering mind that I'm saying this, but Rakerswell, this futurist, talks about how exponentials are really hard for humans to, to grasp. And so actually when we started building the agent, I told the team it's easy. And we've fallen in this trap before. It's easy to build and optimize for today. In 22 we built like copilot, like thing and autocomplete. We train our own models, we optimize the hell out of them. But at some point that modality was kind of not the right modality, which is like the autocomplete modality. And the right modality is actually this I think for now is being able to chat inside the programming environment and for the agent to create things for you. But in order for us to make that bat, a year ago the models were actually not there. The models could not do this, but we were like, okay, we're going to build for the models that are landing in six months. And truly six months later the model started to land that, that are capable of this, of the reasoning that we need and whatever. And so that was like, you know, Sonnet V1, which is, oh wow. Like we switched to it and the reasoning improved so much. And six months later you have Sonnet V2. And so it's really almost like a six month cadence. And so if we're really on this trajectory then you know, I would say, you know, next year you're able to scale, maybe you get thousands of users paying you. The AI can do maintenance. We already showed the AI doing SQL queries and doing migrations. So the AI will be able to do maintenance debugging things like that. I think where it gets really tough is that when you're hitting scale and you want to architect a system that is resilient, so that means you would start sharding databases and we start using different queue systems and components and things like that. And I think the AI needs to have access to the entire suite of tools to be able to do this. And I think that's going to be the next bottleneck and I think the AI needs to be a lot more reliable at doing that. But I could imagine like whatever, five years from now, 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 and, and, and, and you're, you're just, you're just, you're just building and, and, and creating this thing that is, you know, 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, like if the, you know, if the cost of software goes down a lot, like then what is, you know, what is the price that you can charge on software, Right. So can you actually build the next Salesforce? If anyone can generate Salesforce. And then, and then the question is like, what is the. You know, and this is why I emphasize being generative, because I think then the thing that will make you better is by being able to iterate and improve the thing really quickly and generate.
- [54:59]
Lenny Rachitsky
New ideas and stay ahead of all the other people building these tools so quickly. Oh, my God. An interesting other kind of mental model I'm seeing as you talk about this sort of thing is not to offend religious folks, but there's this concept of God, of the gaps. I imagine you've heard that. Yes. 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. There needs to be a God. And it feels like right now humans are like the gaps in these tools or 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.
- [55:44]
Amjad Massad
That's right.
- [55:45]
Lenny Rachitsky
And these gaps will shrink.
- [55:47]
Amjad Massad
I mean, unless we hit some fundamental limit in the current regime of AI, which I'm not an expert about how far transformers could scale, but I feel like we found the thing that could scale pretty far. But maybe there are limitations in data or other things like that that we could be. Could be surprised by. But if there isn't, then we are on a massive trajectory of removing these gaps quickly.
- [56:24]
Lenny Rachitsky
Yeah, very true. We have no idea. We keep thinking it's just going to keep going, but maybe, maybe it'll stop at some point. I could keep going and going, but I think we should also let people go play with these things and process all the things we've been talking about. Is there anything else that you think might be helpful for folks to think about or learn or study?
- [56:43]
Amjad Massad
You know, I'll give advice to sort of founders or leaders at companies. The way we work is going to change rapidly. And it's important to be sort of resilient 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 anything that AI could affect, you want to be able to react to it really quickly. And so when the anthropic dropped the computer use sort of capability, we slot it in our roadmap because we don't really have an explicit roadmap. We immediately jumped on it and started building things and we launched some things around it. We're going to be doing more with it, but like, there's going to be capabilities that are going to drop and you want to really, in some cases, if it really affects your business, you want to be able to jump on it really, really quickly. So being agile, not being sort of stuck with roadmaps, being able to kind of just say, oh, we're just going to switch priorities right away is going to be super important. Not being, you know, like I said with Silos at Replit, there's so many people that are on the scale of like, you know, designer to engineer, designer, product manager. Actually I mentioned Aman earlier. He started as a designer at Replit and now as a product manager. We have people who start as designers, become engineers and we have people in the middle and we're comfortable with that. Like design engineers that fit at different parts of the scale and the, the design engineers go to the design crit meetings and, and some designers go to the engineering meetings and you just got, you got to be fluid, right? Because you know, again, when, when designers can code and, and engineers can design, I mean, it's, it's really becomes it. It. You can't have a lot of structure around that. So you want to build a culture and you want to build an environment or milieu that is like really, really flexible, which is uncomfortable for a lot of people.
- [59:04]
Lenny Rachitsky
Man, the future is wild. Everyone's a hybrid person now. 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 and figuring out how to unblock, allow it to go further and further and further within PM and design land. Based on what you're describing, where the skills will become more valuable is generating ideas almost like finding opportunities, discovery, finding what problems need to be solved and then articulating that as clearly as possible to the AI tooling.
- [59:44]
Amjad Massad
That's right. Super interesting. Yeah, this is, this is a very crisp sort of advice that people can follow today, I think.
- [59:50]
Lenny Rachitsky
Oh man, what a world. Okay, I'm j. This is incredible. My mind is racing. I've got to go build some apps immediately.
- [59:59]
Amjad Massad
Give us feedback.
- [60:00]
Lenny Rachitsky
I will do that. So just to leave listeners with a couple things, one is just what should they know? Should. Where do they find you? How do they try Replit Anything else other than just going to replit.com?
- [60:10]
Amjad Massad
Yeah, just go to replit.com it's an open beta right now. We're kind of quickly improving and going to exit beta, I think, in a few weeks. But if you're comfortable testing something that's not Perfect, go to Replit.com if you subscribe to our core plan, you should be able to access the Agent and start using it. And we are. I think the place where we're most active is Twitter. So Twitter or like X, the handle Replit. Replit or my handle a massad.
- [60:46]
Lenny Rachitsky
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.
- [60:56]
Amjad Massad
All right, so depending on when. When the episode is coming out, this could be the first time people hear about it. But we have this product called Agent. It is sort of high agency, does everything from setting up the project and all of that, right? And so now we are working on Assistant. So Assistant is like, let's say, the cousin of Agent. It is a little less powerful, but a lot more controllable. So you can, like, focus on features or areas of the code that you want to change. And you still don't have to know how to code, but it is a lot more manageable and it is a lot faster. So you saw how it took some time to create the project and code some of the things Assistant is in the order of milliseconds and seconds to be able to respond to you. And so, again, as I talk about the idea of tools, we want people to have as much power and autonomy as possible. And so there are certain instances where Agent is the best. It's going to do the debugging for you, it's going to create the database for you. But if you want more control, Assistant is going to give you that.
- [62:10]
Lenny Rachitsky
Just so folks totally understand what this is going to do for them. What's like, the mental model for what this is like. If it's like a person helping you.
- [62:17]
Amjad Massad
Out, Agent is like having a developer work you give. You give them the prd, right? And they're going to go and build the thing. Assistant is like you're sitting next to them. So they built the thing, and now you walk over to their desk and you say, let me move this button three pixel to the left. Let me change this thing. So small increments of changes that you want happen really quickly and you want to reliably that will give you that. So it's just like much faster iteration on UI and things like that.
- [62:57]
Lenny Rachitsky
Incredible. The future is wild. Final question I always ask everybody how can listeners be useful to you?
- [63:04]
Amjad Massad
Come work at replit. We have a PM role I think up if you're a product manager. We're hiring engineers and and product managers. So come work at replit or refer someone to replit. Especially if you're like our tools and you want them to get better, the best way to do that is to get us great people we can hire.
- [63:25]
Lenny Rachitsky
Well, you're about to get a flood of product managers applying.
- [63:28]
Amjad Massad
Amazing. I love that. Good luck.
- [63:30]
Lenny Rachitsky
Amjad, thank you so much for being here. This was incredible.
- [63:33]
Amjad Massad
Thank you. Thank you for your podcast and the community that you've built and newsletter and everything. It's been awesome to watch.
- [63:40]
Lenny Rachitsky
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. You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show@lennyspodcast.com See you in the next episode.