Replit's CEO: "You Don't Need to Code Anymore"

**Casey Newton** (0:00)
He runs a $9 billion company whose engineers almost tripled their code output this year thanks to agents. So can Replit run itself? That's this week on Platformer. This episode is brought to you by Jira by Atlassian, where teams and coding agents get the context they need to do the right work. Try it free at Jira.dev, that's J-I-R-A dot D-E-V.
Welcome to Platformer, I'm Casey Newton. This week, our guest is Amjad Masad, co-founder and CEO of Replit, which started as a website where beginners could learn to code in a browser and is now one of the biggest names in vibe coding. But it turns out he hates that term. We'll get into it. But first, here to give us some data on the state of AI and jobs is Platformer fellow and Gen Z AI correspondent, Ella Markianos.
Ella, how are you today?

**Ella Markianos** (1:06)
I'm doing very well. How are you?

**Casey Newton** (1:08)
I am good. Now, when it comes to vibe coding, have you ever used Replit or a similar tool or what is your vibe coding tool of choice these days?

**Ella Markianos** (1:17)
I'm only doing stuff in Quad, to be honest. The platform's locked me in and I'm never doing, I think the thing I use it for the most is creating apps that waste my time.

**Casey Newton** (1:34)
Interesting, such as?

**Ella Markianos** (1:36)
I was actually recently hanging out with a friend of mine who I discovered had independently developed the same addiction as me, which is building apps that let you create elo rankings of things you like.
It's like the ranking system in chess, and so you just swipe between two things you prefer. I do it for dresses if I'm online shopping, so it gives me an extra recycling of the online shopping experience. My friend actually did this for all of his Spotify liked songs to get an additional metric on what songs he prefers the most.

**Casey Newton** (2:18)
And so you do this long enough and then at the end, you essentially have a ranked playlist of the songs in the order that you actually prefer them.

**Ella Markianos** (2:26)
Yeah.

**Casey Newton** (2:28)
Well, listen, I've heard of worse apps. I'll say that much.
Well, yeah, this seems like a pretty fun way to spend your time. And speaking of spending time, it's time to find out once again what's going on in AI and jobs. It's not my best segue I've ever done, but it was what I had today.

**Ella Markianos** (2:54)
I appreciate that, Casey.

**Casey Newton** (2:56)
Thank you.

**Ella Markianos** (2:57)
So basically, the World Bank has a new report out about AI in developing countries. And it's kind of a change on the narrative that I've at least been seeing a lot on x.com website, which I unfortunately still have a lot of contact with, where people are talking a lot about AI sovereignty, as in countries who aren't at the frontier developing their own AI models and about how if they aren't at the frontier, they're going to be in the permanent underclass, they're going to get washed by open AI and become irrelevant. That's the narrative that the World Bank really disagrees with.
In particular, the World Bank thinks that currently developing countries are better set up to benefit from AI development because fewer jobs in developing countries are susceptible to AI automation.

**Casey Newton** (4:00)
Tell us a little bit about why they think that. Yeah.

**Ella Markianos** (4:05)
The headline estimate that they have here is that they've put together an index of like jobs that are very at risk from AI versus jobs that stand to see productivity boosted, but won't necessarily be eliminated by AI. And for jobs that are at risk from AI, in developed countries, they say 14.2 percent of jobs are at risk from AI. I might put that a little higher.
But in developing countries, they say that only 4.5 percent of existing jobs are at risk from AI. Basically, because developed countries have more professional services jobs, more IT and communications jobs, and they think computer-based work is more vulnerable. But then the amount we expect, they expect to see benefits is about 16 to 18 percent, both in developing and developed countries.

**Casey Newton** (5:05)
What do you mean by benefit? Is the idea that these jobs will become more valuable and so wages will go up or what?

**Ella Markianos** (5:12)
Yeah. The idea is the jobs will become more valuable, so employment will stay the same and hopefully wages go up.

**Casey Newton** (5:22)
We always love to feature optimism on the show, and I'm somewhat heartened to hear that the World Bank has drawn these inclusions. At the same time, when I hear that only 14 percent of American jobs could be subject to automation, that seems surprising to me given everything else that we've ever talked about on this show.