Replit was building toward the AI coding era years before it had a name. In 2024, the company shipped an agent that could take a request in plain English, work through errors, provision its own infrastructure, and keep going until the software actually worked. The model companies even reached out to ask how Replit had pulled it off.
Co-founder and CEO Amjad Masad had been thinking about making programming radically more accessible since 2008, and Replit’s original pitch deck predicted AI-generated code before the Transformer paper was published. Today, that same technology is moving into banks, manufacturers, and other large companies, where Amjad says teams are replacing software projects once scoped at $10 million with $250,000 of Replit.
On How to Build the Future, Paul Graham sits down with Amjad to talk about why Replit was so well positioned when coding agents arrived, what comes after vibe coding, and his bigger vision for the “self-driving company,” where AI agents increasingly build and operate the software a company needs.
Chapters:
00:00 – "You guys basically invented vibe coding"
02:43 – Watching users copy-paste from ChatGPT
05:27 – The origins of Replit
08:00 – People underestimate their ability to predict the future
10:27 – Grieving the craft
12:52 – A culture of obsessing over users
15:13 – Why enterprises pick Replit
17:28 – The agent was just another user
20:17 – It barely worked, and users loved it
23:13 – $10 million projects now for $250,000
25:45 – Sandboxing for humans
28:14 – "The self-driving company"
30:34 – The way AI flows into companies
33:28 – What Steve Jobs knew before the iPad
35:59 – Killing the sacred cow
38:25 – The rest of the world is two years behind
41:15 – The compute brought on AI
43:46 – The person who assumes dramatic change
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