Is AI Making Coding Obsolete? Replit’s CEO Reveals What Comes Next

We're here with Amjad Massad, CEO of Replit. Thank you so much for being here, Amjad. We really appreciate it. Thank you for having me. Of course. So for people who are not familiar, tell us a little bit about what Replit does and where you guys are headed these days with so much changing in the kind of AI landscape today. If you've heard of the word vibe coding, Replit basically invented that wave back in 2024. We had this radical idea. what if instead of learning to code you can just describe your idea in natural language and not only will we write the code for you but we'll spin up the infrastructure we'll do the databases we'll host it for you and replit has become really a one-stop shop for building applications monetizing them scaling them and so there's a lot of entrepreneurship on the platform but also now we have a lot of enterprises and governments using replit to gain more efficiency and productivity across the organization. Yeah, and thinking about this, it's so really exciting, honestly, to think about where this is all going and what this is doing to kind of democratize all of this. So talk to us about that and the opportunity that you see now for so many more people to be able to kind of get into this world. Yeah, our customers really inspire us. We watch them kind of use the product and they're really reinventing how they work. And we started reinventing how we work around this idea, What if everyone in the company can make software, can spin up AI agents? So we came up with a term to describe it. We call it the self-driving company. It's not that humans are going to go away. It's more like humans are going to step into a new kind of role, which is setting the direction, exercising judgment, taste, being more collaborative as a company. In many ways, work becomes a little bit more human when agents are taking more of that task-oriented work. and Replit is increasingly becoming the platform for AI transformation for these small and big companies to become more self-driving. Yeah and thinking about that concept of self-driving and have this kind of mix of AI and obviously human labor force as well talk to us a little bit about what you see happening to the workforce as we move forward because some people so excited about everything that AI brings and other people worried about hey they're taking my job what do you say to those people where do you think this is going? Well, I think that we all have to recognize that it is a moment of immense change. All our jobs will change. My job certainly has already changed. If you're a software engineer, your job changed four times in two years. You went from typing code to having something that completes a line for you, to having something that completes a function for you, to having something that writes the entire program for you. But we still need engineers, and we're hiring more engineers. And so actually, if you look at the data, there's more entry-level jobs now than there was a year ago. So clearly, jobs are not going away. We just need people to continue. I think both companies, governments, all of that, we need to kind of think about training and upskilling and making sure that people are aware of the change that is coming. And thinking about that, you mentioned needing more engineers, for example. What is one of the biggest challenges that you face? is it getting those people into those roles or other challenges that you're really trying to work on right now? Well, I think finding people that are AI native, right? Finding people that really embrace AI, because what happens, I mean, you see mathematicians now dealing with it, where when AI impacts your field, the first thing you feel is like sort of kind of anger, maybe rejection. And then you go through a period of grief and then acceptance come and then embracing. And there's still a lot of software engineers that hasn't embraced the kind of shift to AI. So a lot of what we do is kind of trying to find these people. Luckily, a lot of them are on our platform. So a lot of people are using our platform. So we're hiring from our users. Yeah. And thinking about your users, talk to us a little bit about who the users are, because you mentioned you have obviously private customers, but you also have governments and others that we might not think of as who would be using this platform. So tell us a little bit about that breakdown? Yeah, so we have a lot of small businesses. Those are, you know, there's like, for example, a fishing business in the UK. They sell fishing equipments. They run all their back operations on Replit. They run their Shopify store on Replit. The whole company is sort of like a small family-run AI native business, which is really inspiring to see. There's a company here in the U.S., Gen AI PI, someone, his name is John Chaney, started with Replit with $400. You know, he's making millions of dollars. The company's worth over $20 million. And so there's this resurgence of the American dream. It's not just American. It's like the American dream in the cloud because everyone can participate in it. But really in the golden era of entrepreneurship, especially small and medium business entrepreneurship. Now on the bigger side companies want to transform they also want to become ai native so we have companies like Amex Visa we have companies in Japan like SMBC big banks big financial services and you know they've always been on the cutting edge of software and digitalization and now they realize they have to go through another transformation and inside those companies actually not that different than what we see from our entrepreneurs. It's entrepreneurial people that are carrying the mantle, that are adopting these tools, that are training other people, that are kind of teaching other people and helping with AI adoption within these companies. Yeah, I mean, this AI adoption is just growing and obviously not slowing down anytime soon. When you think about what's next, where are you looking at the company being by the end of this year, next year? Where do you think this is going? So I agree with you, AI adoption is growing, but we're here in Silicon Valley, you know, the difference between what the average employee in Silicon Valley, the access they have to tools versus someone at a U.S. bank even is tremendous, is like multiple years. They just started adopting ChatGPT essentially, right? And we are out here like doing agents and so on. So there's still a long road to go. And a big part of it is we need to make the technology safe and secure. like when I talk to like big bank CEOs and so on they tell me the the main thing we care about is security security security and maybe cost you know I think in the media everyone's talking about cost token cost and so on I think the more important thing is all these CEOs are looking are seeing the Hugging Face incident are seeing all these hacks happen it's like whoa we don't want any part of that and so at Replicate a lot of our effort is around sandboxing of the agent Can we make sure even if the agent goes rogue, it doesn't destroy your databases, it doesn't destroy your environment? And this is why we're seeing a lot of traction in the enterprise. Yeah, I mean, I was going to ask you about security because it's just the biggest key right now. Since so many people, every company is so worried about this. Thinking about where you're headed with all of the security and all of those concerns, how do you also draw on all of your experience, right? You were at Meta, you have a ton of experience in this space to draw on that as you move forward with this, especially keeping in mind security that everyone is so worried about. Yeah. So even before Meta, I was at a company called Code Academy where we taught a lot of people how to code. Even back then, I was building sandboxes and letting people code in these environments. We didn't have agents, but we had human agents. And they were, in some cases, hackers and fraudsters and crypto miners. And so I had to build a lot of expertise in how to create secure environments. At Facebook, I worked on open source developer tools. And also you run into a lot of security issues. And so there's a through line through my entire career kind of focused on how to make things safe but never introduce a lot of risk, how to minimize risk while increasing power. And those things come hand in hand because you can create a very powerful piece of software, but if it's not secure, then just the tinkerers and hobbyists will use it. And the people who are serious, the governments, the big enterprises, they're not going to use it. Yeah, it's so important. Security is such a key there. We really appreciate you being here today. I'm Jen Massad. Thank you so much. Appreciate it.