Replit CEO on AI Breakthroughs: ‘We Don’t Care About Professional Coders Anymore’
Replit, an AI coding startup platform, has made a dramatic pivot away from professional programmers in a fundamental shift in how software may be created in the future. “We don’t care about professional coders anymore,” CEO Amjad Masad told Semafor, as the company refocuses on helping non-developers build software using AI.
The strategic shift follows the September launch of Replit’s “Agent” tool, which can create working applications from simple text commands. The tool, powered by Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet AI model, has driven a five-fold revenue increase in six months. The move marks a significant departure for Replit, which built its business providing online coding tools for software developers. The company is now betting that AI will make traditional programming skills less crucial, allowing non-technical users to create software through natural language instructions.
Black Parrot
In my experience, business “analysts” don’t know what the hell they want, let alone how to specify it.
I’ve been asked to create reports that add pounds + gallons, and it’s almost impossible to get them to understand why that’s nonsense.
caseih
Maybe AI would be able to tell them what they want makes no sense, whereas a human programmer has to worry about tact and of course not getting fired.
AleRunner
My main experience with AI in programming is that it regularly produces things that don’t exist. References to libraries that have never been made. Function calls that should exist but don’t and so on. There are things that it’s useful for and can do much more quickly and accurately than a human but immediately the smallest amount of thought is needed, it does what you tell it to whether or not that’s possible. I expect that we’ll get a bunch of cars soon where the code is set up to use the “eco brake” for emergency breaking because there ought to be an eco brake so it makes sense to use it, even if nobody has invented such a thing yet.
Given their own hallucinations, I doubt the AI is going to save us from product management that has no idea what could and couldn’t work. Rather just allow them to get lots further before they find out that what they are trying to do is impossible.