Replit CEO Amjad Masad: Coding Agents, Autonomy, and the Future of Work

**Amjad Masad** (0:00)
I think that like dystopian view of AI, or AI as like taking all our jobs and all of that is like not correct. And I think the future of work is more human, is more interactive, is more multimodal. Once the making of things gets easier, the bottleneck goes back to like how many ideas you can have. I wouldn't put learning code as the top thing, I would put learn to make things. Learn to make things with code, learn to make things with video, learn to make like anything with AI.

**Tom** (0:37)
Welcome back to The Breakdown. I'm Dave, this is Tom, and today we're joined by Amjad Massad. Amjad is founder and CEO of Replit, which was a YC 2018 company. Welcome to the show.

**Amjad Masad** (0:47)
Thank you.

**Tom** (0:48)
So today, we want to talk about kind of your beginnings in helping people learn to code, what you're doing now in replacing a lot of that work, and then where we see the future going in terms of how people make things. So Replit started, I guess, in 2016 You were in YC in 2018
You started out as a tool to make it really easy for people learning to program, to set up development environments purely on the web. But now you're really taking off in AI-assisted coding. Tell us the latest.

**Amjad Masad** (1:18)
Yeah, so the mission has always been to make programming more accessible. Then we sort of, you know, after YC, we sort of updated it to be a little more ambitious. We started talking about a billion software developers, and it just sounded absurd at the time.

**Dave** (1:33)
This was all pre-LM, right?

**Amjad Masad** (1:35)
Yeah, pre-LM. There was a moment of time, I don't know if you remember that, but like in the 2015 AI hype, there was like a bit of an NLP, natural language hype as well. There's a bunch of AI companies that ended up being just like humans behind the scene, they all went broke. But there was like a glimpse of potentially doing NLP on code. So we had an idea that, you know, it's probably coming. I even had it in my in my seed deck that like, at some point, like we'll collect enough data to like train models. It wasn't until like GPT-2 in 2020 that I felt like it was going to be possible. So we, you know, we had built all these primitives, like the development environment, the sort of hosting environment, all the other stuff around it. And it felt like if we just like added like AI agents, like it will be able to orchestrate all the stuff and it'll be, it'll be really great. But agents were like every time we tried them. I think the first time we tried it, like 2021 didn't work, 22 didn't work. And then 2024, like early, early in the year, we just felt like it's getting close. Even GPT-4 could like be coherent for like two minutes. Somehow just ended up doing a big bet. The company was not doing super well.

**Dave** (2:55)
Yeah, I was about to ask, was there like a bet the company moment where it's like we were teaching people to code, now we're no longer doing that, now we're going to enable everyone to build apps?

**Amjad Masad** (3:02)
Yeah, we had grown the company quite a bit and we were burning way too much money and we decided to do a layoff. And so we cut like perhaps 50 people and then like another like 15, 20 people left. And so we were like less than half of the company. And so I just put everything on Replit Agent. I just felt like this is the thing. It has to work. It felt like it was close.
I don't know. I was just like burned the boats kind of moments. It's just like, we got to do this. I mean, I felt like this was the thing that will make the company work. And honestly, like if Claw 3.5 hadn't come out, mid us building agent, we would have probably failed. Because like I said, like GPT-40 would like stay coherent for two, three minutes. Claw 3.5 was the first one that could work for like five to 10 minutes and actually work. And the co-generations are also-

**Dave** (3:56)
And that's sort of the approach that I think is most successful for startups, kind of building on the very edge of what is possible. You start out on a mission, the technology is not quite there yet. You start building and you sort of, you skate where the puck is going. Yeah. It sort of catches up with you.