How AI will change programming with Amjad Masad, CEO of Replit

The way I think about automation is that it sort of takes each of the jobs from the bottom-up ... Meaning, the low-skill software creation, I think, will get fully automated. So, I think, pretty soon, probably this year, there's going to be products... where you can go put in a paragraph description of a piece of software and get an initial thing with the code and with the app running. I think this will happen very, very soon.

I sort of came up in a time where the web was just becoming mature enough to build real applications on, and it was a very exciting time. JavaScript was getting really fast. You had NodeJS ... This moment feels like that times 10.

It was actually kind of frustrating, because as a founder/developer... everything feels like it's one weekend of hacking away; and it's like, turns out, no, it's actually more than a decade.

I was an early GitHub user, perhaps in their beta I think. I was so excited about GitHub. I was also so disappointed by how little they evolved beyond the initial sort of kernel of an idea.

Clay Christensen switched that question—his primary insight is that people hire products in the same way that you hire people.

The fastest story I've heard on Replit is someone coming into Replit with an idea for a product and getting it 30 minutes later. And the way they got it is without writing a single line of code is by relying on a human machine centaur of sorts.

I have kids, and trying to program your kids or trying to make them do a certain thing is incredibly difficult. It's actually the same thing with large language models. It's almost like trying to teach kids something, like you have to keep talking to them to find the right set of words to convince them to do what you want.

We're really trying to be un-ideological about how people make software, and the idea is really trying to reduce the distance between an idea and a piece of product.