Behind the product: Replit | Amjad Masad (co-founder and CEO)
Lenny's Podcast: Product | Growth | Career
Lenny Rachitsky
5 • 1.5K Ratings
🗓️ 21 November 2024
⏱️ 64 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Amjad Masad is the co-founder and CEO of Replit, a browser-based coding environment that allows anyone to write and deploy code. Replit has 34 million users globally and is one of the fastest-growing developer communities in the world. Prior to Replit, Amjad worked at Facebook, where he led the JavaScript infrastructure team and contributed to popular open-source developer tools. Additionally, he played a key role as a founding engineer at the online coding school Codecademy. In our conversation, Amjad shares:
• A live demo of Replit in action
• How Replit’s AI agent can build full-stack web applications from a simple text prompt
• The implications of AI-powered development for product managers, designers, and engineers
• How this might reshape companies and careers
• Why being “generative” will become an increasingly valuable skill
• “Amjad’s law” and how learning to debug AI-generated code is becoming ever more valuable
• Much more
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Find the transcript at: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/behind-the-product-replit-amjad-masad
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Where to find Amjad Masad:
• X: https://x.com/amasad
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/amjadmasad/
• Website: https://amasad.me/
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Where to find Lenny:
• Newsletter: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com
• X: https://twitter.com/lennysan
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lennyrachitsky/
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In this episode, we cover:
(00:00) Introduction to Amjad Masad and Replit
(02:41) The vision and challenges of Replit
(06:50) Replit’s growth and user stories
(10:49) Demo of Replit’s capabilities
(16:51) Building and iterating with Replit
(25:04) Real-world applications and use cases
(30:13) The technology stack
(33:48) The evolution of Replit and its capabilities
(39:36) The future of AI in software development
(44:04) Skills for the future: generative thinking and coding
(47:26) Amjad’s law
(50:36) Replit’s new developments and future plans
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Referenced:
• Replit: https://replit.com/
• Cursor: https://www.cursor.com
• Aman Mathur on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aman-mathur/
• Node: https://nodejs.org/en
• Claude: https://claude.ai/
• Salesforce: https://www.salesforce.com/
• Wasm: https://webassembly.org/
• Figma: https://www.figma.com/
• Codecademy: https://www.codecademy.com/
• Hacker News: https://news.ycombinator.com/news
• Paul Graham’s website: https://www.paulgraham.com/
• Jevons paradox: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
• Anthropic: https://www.anthropic.com/
• Open AI: https://openai.com/
• Amjad’s tweet about “society of models”: https://x.com/amasad/status/1568941103709290496
• About HCI: https://www.designdisciplin.com/p/hci-profession
• Taylor Swift’s website: https://www.taylorswift.com/
• Andrew Wilkinson on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/awilkinson/
• Haya Odeh on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/haya-odeh-b0725928/
• Amjad’s law: https://x.com/snowmaker/status/1847377464705896544
• Ray Kurzweil’s website: https://www.thekurzweillibrary.com/
• God of the gaps: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_of_the_gaps
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Lenny may be an investor in the companies discussed.
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Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | The idea behind Replett is that making software today is very difficult. |
| 0:04.0 | We want to make it easier. |
| 0:05.5 | People view this as a developer in their pocket essentially. |
| 0:10.6 | We have 34 million users globally. |
| 0:13.2 | There's people everywhere learning to code on Replit, building startups, |
| 0:17.7 | building personal software, personal tools. |
| 0:20.4 | For people building products, they product managers, founders. |
| 0:23.7 | Like, what skills do you see will matter more, matter less? |
| 0:27.2 | Typically, your bottlenecked where your ideas are not fitting in because, like, they need to be made and they need to be made quickly. |
| 0:33.6 | Now you open up that bottleneck. |
| 0:35.7 | So now, like, actually making things is a lot easier. |
| 0:39.8 | Actually, you become limited by how fast you can generate ideas. I think people are unaware of just |
| 0:46.0 | how far things have gone. I could imagine, whatever, five years from now, someone running a billion |
| 0:51.7 | dollar company with zero employees where it's like the support is handled by AI, |
| 0:55.9 | the development is handled by AI, and you're just building and creating this thing. |
| 1:01.1 | Man, the future is wild. |
| 1:08.5 | Today, my guest is Amjad Masad. |
| 1:14.8 | Amjot is the co-founder of Repliment, an AI-powered software development and deployment platform for building and shipping software. It's one of the fastest growing developer |
| 1:19.4 | communities and AI products in the world. There's a lot of talk these days about how AI is changing, |
| 1:25.1 | how products will be built, how product teams are going to operate, |
| 1:28.1 | which functions will be more and less valuable over time. But I feel like very few people have |
| 1:32.6 | actually seen what modern AI tools can do and have fully grasped how much you can get done |
... |
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