How Replit is using AI to supercharge IDEs with Amjad Masad | E1814

22 Sep 2023 · 1 h 11 min

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In short

Podcast Summary: This Week in Startups - Episode E1814

Episode Overview In this episode, Jason Calacanis interviews Amjad Masad, the CEO of Replit, focusing on the integration of AI into Integrated Development Environments (IDEs) and how it is transforming the coding landscape. They discuss Replit’s innovations, including its Ghostwriter feature, and the broader implications of AI on software development.

Key Topics Discussed

  1. The Importance of IDEs
  2. Definition and Function: IDEs are crucial for developers as they provide an integrated environment to write, debug, test, and run software.
  3. Historical Context: Early coding environments involved using simple text editors and command line tools, which were less accessible to novice developers.
  1. Advancements in AI for Coding
  2. Ghostwriter Feature: Replit’s AI-powered tool that assists developers by suggesting code and debugging.
  3. AI's Impact on Productivity: The potential for AI tools to significantly enhance coding efficiency, with some estimates suggesting up to 80% productivity improvement for programmers.
  1. The Role of Autonomous Agents
  2. Definition: Autonomous agents can independently manage coding tasks by breaking down projects into manageable subtasks.
  3. Future Vision: The aspiration to develop agents capable of building complex applications based on high-level instructions from users.
  1. Bounties and Community Engagement
  2. Replit's Bounties Platform: A way for developers to earn money by completing coding tasks posted by others, fostering a collaborative environment.
  3. Real-World Applications: The platform has shown impressive early results, reaching a million annualized GMV shortly after its launch.
  1. Democratizing Coding
  2. Increased Accessibility: Replit’s goal to make coding more accessible to non-developers through easier tools and learning resources.
  3. The 100 Days of Python Course: A structured program aimed at onboarding new developers effectively.
  1. Future of AI in Development
  2. Artificial Developer Intelligence (ADI): Replit's mission to enhance developer capabilities rather than replace them.
  3. Vision of AI-Assisted Creation: Encouraging creativity and innovation through tools that allow users to create complex systems with less coding expertise.
  1. Broader Implications of AI
  2. Cultural Shift: Reflecting on how technology can shift from being a consumer tool to a creator’s tool, empowering more individuals to contribute to software development.
  3. Historical Context: Discussion of the roots of Silicon Valley's innovation and how cultural movements have influenced technological advancements.

Key Quotes

  • "We want to build artificial developer intelligence (ADI) to augment you as a developer." - Amjad Masad
  • "The first line of code to deployment, we can inject AI exactly at the right places." - Amjad Masad

Conclusion The episode emphasizes the transformative potential of AI in the coding world, particularly through tools like Replit's Ghostwriter and the Bounties platform. Amjad Masad articulates a vision where coding becomes more accessible and less daunting, allowing a broader range of people to participate in the digital economy. With continuous advancements in AI, the future of software development appears poised for significant evolution, fostering innovation and creativity.

Resources Mentioned

  • Replit: [Visit Replit](https://replit.com)
  • Follow Amjad Masad: [Twitter Profile](https://twitter.com/amasad)

Call to Action Listeners are encouraged to explore coding through Replit and engage with the community to enhance their programming skills and creativity.

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Transcript

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0:00the technology industry these these guys were all on acid and mushrooms and coming out of the hippie zippy movement and they really were opening the doors of perception and then they were with computers at the same time yeah and you know imagine you're tripping on acid and you know you're also like using new technology for the first time you're like yeah i have some interesting ideas here we should make a mouse it's like a mouse what yeah it's like a little thing you move it around it moves the pointer like literally a lot of these innovations happen from 60s radicals you know, coming up with really interesting ideas.

0:35This Week in Startups is brought to you by LinkedIn Jobs. A business is only as strong as its people, and every hire matters. Post your first job for free at linkedin.com slash twist. .tech domains has a new program called startups.tech, where you can get your company featured on This Week in Startups. Go to startups.tech slash Jason to find out how. And SuperGut is the only nutrition brand clinically proven to improve digestion, balance blood sugar, sustain energy, and manage weight. Save 25 % on their delicious shakes, bars, and prebiotic mix at SuperGut.com with code TWIST. All right, everybody.

1:20Welcome back to This Week in Startups. As you know, AI has had a blistering year or two here in Silicon Valley. And one of the reasons is we have so many amazing developers and the tools for developers to build interesting stuff have gotten better and better. And one of those tools that you hear about all the time is replit r e p l i t. In fact, I decided to get into coding and I was talking to my friend, Sonny and he's like, oh, just open repli do this. And so I started playing with and they started taking their 100 day Python course got to date three or four and decided, you know what? i don't have the time to do this well it's gonna be incredibly frustrating for me but it's super inspiring uh to see how many people are getting into coding and how uh you know these um uh ide's and we'll talk about that in a second uh have really made that possible for many more people i'm john massad is the co-founder and ceo of replit and he joins us today i'm john how you doing Good.

2:23I'm doing great. Good to be back on the show. We actually did a show a long time ago. We did? That's the first time this has ever happened. When did we do the show? In 2018 or 19. Really? Oh my lord. We're a baby company, small startup. I mean, at the time, there was tons of skepticism whether what we're doing is useful, whether people want to use it, or this idea we're putting out that a lot more people would want to learn how to code. A lot more people would want to make a career out of it. Oh, right. Now I remember. You came on during the pandemic. Yeah. Right. You had just raised your Series A.

3:00Oh, yeah. 2020. Early on 2020. It's 2020. Yeah. Yeah. So, IDEs. Why are these important? You know, when you're... For any type of job, there's an environment that you need for that job. that's both in physical life. If you're doing something with your hand, you need a workbench. In software, if you're an accountant, your environment perhaps is an Excel spreadsheet or any form of the new spreadsheets now coming out. If you're a developer, your environment is either some kind of homegrown combination of a Linux terminal and an editor and homegrown scripts and all of that, which traditionally been the case, or what's called an integrated development environment.

3:50And that's basically bringing together a lot of tools that make it easy to write, debug, test, and run software. And a lot of features are starting to get added to that, I think, since the last time we spoke. Co-pilots, you call yours Ghost Rider, and training, obviously. A lot of different features get added to this. So before these IDs, people would do what? They would have just a collection of tools on their desktop? Yeah, basically, it's, you know, the traditional view on this is that I just need an editor. I just need a place to type code. I'm such a hardcore coder. I just need Vi, you know, or Vim or Emacs.

4:36And then, you know, I'm just going to like run my code and run compilation of my code. I get whatever errors out of that. and I'll go back to my editor and fix that. And that workflow kind of worked for a lot of people. It's sort of hard. It's hard to figure out. It's hard to figure out all these tools. But, you know, that became, for whatever reason, the industry standard. And at some point, I think Microsoft would probably, you know, I'm sure some history buffs can correct me on this, but Microsoft really mainstreamed the idea of an IDE and Visual Studio was one of their bigger products early on.

5:12And so they put a lot of effort into making the development experience on Windows. And that's something, by the way, it's missing in the history of Silicon Valley, like how much of success of these companies, Apple included and Microsoft, is about really building the best development environment in the world. You know, Apple puts a lot of work into Xcode, into their SDKs and their APIs, and Microsoft has done the same. now when the shift happened towards more open source and linux and unix we lost a lot of that and we went back to this hodgepodge of tools figure it out yourself and people would use a text editor essentially like vim's a text editor at a school basically it's like a stripped down word processor exactly and you could like add things to it you can script it whatever some people enjoy that process but it really sort of hindered a lot of people from accessing this field because the first thing you see is this blank terminal thing.

6:10It doesn't look intuitive. It doesn't look like anything you would want to do anything in. And so Replit's initial product was that not only we're going to make this IDE on top of open source software, everything from the ground up is open source that we're building on, but also we're going to put it in the browser. We're going to make it so easy. you're going to go again like your friend anyone today is like interested in kicking the tires doing something with software you just go to replet sign up in a few minutes and you have an environment and you can start coding yeah and the ability to have a co-pilot and to debug has taken some of the harder aspects of being a coder especially if you're a solo coder it's changed things dramatically so maybe you could talk a little bit about the impact of I think, I don't know what you call debuggers that explain why this is wrong and how sophisticated they've gotten.

7:07It's not just reporting back like here's the error. They've gotten more sophisticated that so maybe a little bit on both sides of that the ghost rider, the co pilot, and these more sophisticated debugging tools. Yeah, again, going back to Microsoft and actually some microsystems and Finoz is an investor in DropLit right now. But there's a lot of these bigger companies, what they've done with Java or C Sharp or these development environments is they built what was called IntelliSense at the time. it's sort of this classical AI that figures out the symbols in your application and gives you these autocomplete tools that help you kind of type less and for the computer to help you kind of debug your code and give you some intelligence.

7:51Of course, it's all classical intelligence. So it's all symbolic, right? Like, it's all algorithmic. We're trying to find, you know, we're creating this parse tree, we're trying to find the structure between the code. It's really, really hard stuff. And I worked on this stuff for a long time at Facebook and, and other companies. The thing that was missing this whole time is that actually, you could represent code statistically. And in you can apply the same methods we apply in natural language. So NLP natural language processing on code. And this was not obvious a lot of people for a long time, there was a paper that I think was sort of a seminal paper in this era called On the Naturalness of Software in 2012.

8:38And it presented the idea that you can actually look at software as sort of like natural language. It's very repetitive. It has certain structures. It has certain semantics. And then you had the deep learning revolution. People started applying natural language processing, applying deep learning and natural language processing. And then you get into what happened with GPT, starting with Transformers, BERT, and then GPT-2, that's when, to me, it started looking obvious that, okay, these tools are going to completely disrupt how we write code. It's going to change the mechanics of how the machine helps us write code, how we can become more productive.

9:18And so we actually started building on top of that really early on. And we were the first major company outside of Microsoft to release a Copilot-type product. And we did it in a way that we didn't actually rely on OpenAI. We actually did an open source model and we trained our model and we open source it as well. And that technology now has become accessible such that really anyone can do it. So how does it change software? Well, for one, our autocomplete tools become a lot more powerful, right? You type a little bit of code, you type even natural language command and AI based on its training based on reading all of GitHub and all of open source code out there, it knows that, you know, every time you are importing this library, and you're kind of doing this function that way, that you probably wanted to do it to write the rest of the code in this way.

10:15So it'll present a suggestion. So that's the sort of co-pilot interaction. But it doesn't stop there. So that's really a typing aid at the end of the day. It's really helping you type less. creating a job and finding qualified candidates. It's so time consuming. Don't I know it? I'm trying to add five positions right now because things are going so well at the launch fund. But you know what? I have a secret weapon. And I'm going to share it with you Lincoln jobs. They're about to hit a billion users over at LinkedIn. So just think about all the insanely qualified people that are there looking for work.

10:50You just go post your role on LinkedIn, and you will be 100 % certain that you got access to the most qualified candidates. And guess what? first ones on us. That's right. First drinks on us. Go to linkedin.com slash twist and post your first job for free. You got nothing to lose. And that will give you that purple ring on your profile. You see that everybody's got the purple ring now. That means everybody in your network knows you're hiring, they click on it, and you'll get those friends of friends, right? Those are the really high quality leads that you want applying to your job because there's someone in your network who can vet them.

11:23So I did that for launch. And I do it for inside and we found so many amazing people at our company. When you think LinkedIn jobs, I want you to think better candidates faster. Let me say that one more time better candidates faster. LinkedIn jobs will help you find the qualified candidates you want to talk to faster, push your job for free at linkedin.com slash twist. That's linkedin.com slash twist to post your job for free terms and conditions to apply. And for people who are not coders, you you see experience this now when you're using notion or microsoft word or gmail it just here's the next possible words would love to and it's invite you to whatever and it's studying what you've been writing emails about so it's for it's precisely for you and it's based on the whole corpus of you know people writing in you know on the open web so fascinating how much more impactful it is in coding right because uh coding is a higher value typically than what people are writing in email.

12:22And it's been harder to apply those technologies on code. So it really took until GPT-2 and GPT-3 for this to actually become possible. Because we've had these suggestion tools for a long time for natural language, but not for code. But once these models got big enough and intelligent enough, now they're able to complete code because code needs to be structured, needs to be parsed, needs to be run, needs to be correct. whereas natural language doesn't have a lot of these properties now but but it doesn't stop there and i think that's useful and it really um made a lot of programmers a lot more productive but but typing is like perhaps 10 of what we do uh as programmers most of the time we're staring at error logs.

13:11Other times, we have a crash in production where we get an email, we get a PM kind of coming to us and saying, hey, the software's crashing, you know, fix that. We get a bug, whatever it is. And this is, I think, where it gets really exciting because this is where we can start to get multiples more productivity. I think with a co-pilot interaction, at best, some people are saying it's 80%, making me 80 % more productive. But can we get 2x, 5x, 10x more productive. This is where leveraging AI to help you through the entire software lifecycle comes in. And this is where Replit, I think, is very well positioned because Replit is fully bundled environment.

13:55So from your first line of code, to your first deployment, to your scale deployment. So we take the entire software lifecycle and we package it in one place. Now we can inject AI exactly at the right places to be able to help you in this crucial moment when you get this crash of production. Now, the next stage after that, just to mention, the next stage after that is agents. And agents are still primitive right now. That was exactly where I was going. So let's define an agent for the audience and how that might work if you were building Uber today or you were building Airbnb today. Right. So the way we use AI today in this co-pilot fashion and this autocomplete fashion is that I am doing the driving as a human.

14:41I am doing the thing. And there's something that's augmenting my behavior such that it's making it easier to code or type or do something. Agent inverts that a little bit. And you give the agent one instruction, one higher level goal. and the agent is responsible for breaking down that task into sub-tasks and for going and executing those tasks in an autonomous fashion. And what that commits you to is that the agent needs to actually be able to recover from errors, needs to be able to recover from a lot of edge cases that you face in the real world. And some people talk about agents with a human in the loop, but for the most part, what we want is agents to be fully autonomous, to be able to do work on our behalf.

15:31And, you know, for example, I should be able to, you know, tell Siri, like, high-level goals such as, you know, my wife and I, you know, today's our anniversary date and I want to go out to a nice restaurant. It should be able to figure out, okay, I need to go research nice restaurants in Palo Alto. I need to figure out, like, the budget on those. I need to call them one-by-one and get a reservation and then report back to my user what exactly happened and the flow that happened and whether there were errors or what have you. So this is where agents get a little more exciting than the way we're using AIs today.

16:12And in the case of building a business, building a startup, it could be, hey, I want to build a marketplace. Okay. Buyers and sellers, take rate it would know a lot of these fundamental items and then it would know what kind of code oh you need a profile page oh you know what's on the profile page describe it oh it's a home okay what are you gonna do with the home sell it rent it you know uh do um you know home maintenance tasks you'd have a whole uh bevy of of possibilities that the agent would be then able to go build how far is that is that even on your roadmap to start thinking like that you're building an app and you're dealing with non-developers uh and you think about that yeah yeah one milestone we're trying to hit this year is to be able to tell an agent i want like a login page or something like that like just one feature that's very concrete that developers do every day and for that agent to be able to fork off your environment which is very easy to do on replet and for you to be able to watch it and go and try to build that and run into errors or recover from those errors and then come back to you with the code saying, here, I finished it.

17:25And then there's a cursive loop where you say, okay, this is good. This is not good. It's sort of similar to how you're dealing with a junior engineer. Yeah. So let's try to automate that really simple, like junior engineer interaction you have. And I think from there, it could progress really rapidly. The thing you talked about where I can tell it, go build me a marketplace startup. Feels very far away. It feels probably five years away. But who knows? I mean, the way these things have been moving is it's, you know, what I tell my team is that we just need to be very reactive to the changes in the AI space.

18:09And we're at the bleeding edge of it. And we make a lot of the some major contributions to the field as well. but uh who knows like maybe there's an unlock later this year or next year that the vision that you just put out could be possible next year but my estimation currently is that we're going to get as a totally closer to that over the next five years yeah the thing that's really obvious when you had user registration is hey like there are some best practices here one of the best practices is uh using a magic link like uh i think slack was really pioneered or maybe it was craigslist before them uh did that as well um phone number do you want to use google facebook twitter x you know whichever to do those logins and so it's something you're uniquely qualified to do because you get to see i don't know how many millions of developers hundreds of i would suspect hundreds of thousands of developers are on replet now millions millions of developers in replet, which is pretty impressive.

19:11You know that that alone gives you an insight into oh, yeah, people are doing the magic link thing. Oh, they are using phones. And everybody. Yeah, good. And also, we have the bounties platform. I remember that you've also checked it out. Yeah, I did. Pretty amazing. Yeah, well, yeah, bounties program. Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, because replet just on boards this huge number of people from all over the world onto programming. One of the things that I found challenging when I talked to these developers is that landing their first job is actually quite difficult, because people want experience and all of that.

19:51But a lot of these people, when you look at their profiles, when you look at their replica profiles, they're actually better than a lot of Silicon Valley engineers. So what is the best way to show that they're better is to create a platform where they have real work for real customers or real clients available on that platform. At the same time, they can make money. And maybe that could be a business for us that we could make money out of. But that's really not the priority here. The priority is to showcase that we have a huge number of developers around the world that are AI powered now, and I can build amazing things really fast and really cheaply.

20:31Yeah. And so we put it out and in a matter of months, it reached a million annualized GMV. We should have sort of hit on something. It's basically we had this backlog of developers that are hungry to do work and show that they're able to do work. And that created this explosion. Yeah. And you have surplus cycles. There are developers who have, you know, maybe it's a Saturday and, you know, whatever their plans fell through, they got four hours. and you put up a little challenge and like that's easy i'll i'll take that 500 free money i'll pick it up off the ground um yeah one of the things that was surprising was um i didn't expect like big tech employees to be engaged in that but one of our biggest bounty hunters is uh is this sre at vmware that does it on the weekends and on the plane and it's a game for him and he's making all this all this money but for us it's also a very valuable source of data to be able to make our ai better as well.

21:31When you're able to match project description to output of work, we're going to be able to make the agent thing work a lot better. Also, we want the developers, the bounties developers and developers on Replit, to be able to use that to increase their earning potential and to become more productive. One thing from the start at Replit, we've been very clear on is that we're not one of these companies trying to build AGI. We're trying to build ADI, artificial developer intelligence. We're trying to augment you as a developer, as a solo entrepreneur, as someone who wants to build a business online, someone who wants to participate in the global digital economy.

22:17We want to supercharge you such that it feels like you have an army of developers working for you. stop what you're doing right now i got great news dot tech domains is giving twist listeners a new platform to show off their startups and that platform is this podcast this week in startups it's a new segment we're calling pitch j cow i want you to go to startups dot tech slash jason startups dot t-e-c-h slash jason to apply there's only one rule you have to have a dot tech domain name to get featured. This week, I received a great pitch from hive power.tech. That's HIV power.tech, which you can see in the video right now if you're watching hive power is a Swiss startup, they're working on transforming energy management, and their software platform helps businesses optimize EV charging, distribute energy more effectively and more energy prices have gotten out of control, they're volatile.

23:15So hive power is saving businesses money by optimizing energy efficiently like all these different times when you can get discounts on your energy. It's a huge market and they got a great domain name. Check them out hive power.tech. And if you're interested in getting featured on this week in startups, go to startups.tech slash Jason and apply today. That's startups.tech slash Jason. it's interesting while you were talking i was like huh i wonder if chat gpt could actually uh you know build a plan and so i asked chat gpt please build me a feature set for a modern day marketplace uh for folks to rent vacation homes and cars so it's certainly here's the features put it i i have in my instructions with chat gpt4 that i like things in tables with links and it says here's the feature category here's the feature description here's the stakeholder and here's your data source or api user registration enable users to create an account via email social media or google and to your point you'll have that done by the end of the year i actually believe you'll be able to do that user profile allow user to upload photos id and basic information search engine with filters like location price rating amenities calendar availability payment gateway listing creation pricing engine enabled dynamic pricing based on demand location and time that feels like something actually a pricing engine could be something that could be built into replet uh inventory management uh a review system that's it that's a layup star ratings also a layup dashboard give administrators overview bookings revenue fraud detection that would definitely I mean there's third party services that do that you plug in analytics third party services I mean that's after one prompt you know if we sat here and we started prompt engineering this and then connected it to replet a year from now I don't know maybe half this stuff gets done or at least some portion of it actually today even ghost rider I mean I'll I can show you a quick demo of what it looks like today.

25:22So here, I just started Node.js REPL, what we call projects. And basically, I have just one file. You can start by writing code, but I can also generate code. Let's say make a login page with Express.js. And I'll start writing the entire function for me. It's still not an agent in the way I describe it, because I'm looking at what it's doing, and I'm reviewing what it's doing. What we want is for it to actually be able to do all of that, run the code itself, be able to deploy the code and be able to get feedback on it. But right now, it just made this login page right here, right? Okay, it's a start.

26:09And we can iterate on that from here, it can just say, let's, I can right click, edit code, and just say, add some CSS us to make it nicer yeah uh and i can iterate uh with it but we want to get to a place where it does that sort of iteration on its own yeah it's pretty pretty slick already yeah uh when you think about it and you know there are so many problems in the world you know everybody gets to like oh it's going to replace developers it's like yeah until we have a solution for every problem that humans face uh i think developers are going to stay busy what this really means is the typical startup is going to release features faster and make them better uh continuously and faster just like open source was a catalyst just like ids were a catalyst just like cloud was a catalyst all this stuff just makes everything go faster and the average app today compared to the average app just 10 years ago you know in the app store and the app store is only whatever number years old it is now um maybe it's 15 years old when the app store started 2007 or i think i think 2009 because that's a nine remember steve jobs didn't want an app store he thought thought the web would be enough of an app store yeah yeah not quite by the way this we just added this feature to be able to deploy your app right from Replet.

27:40So this means you're in competition with AWS. When you do this, you'll be like a hosting company in addition to... Our vision from the start is to do the end-to-end process. And again, this is where we can do interesting things with artificial intelligence, such that the AI can deploy, the AI can figure out the errors in production and iterate on them as well. But, you know, I think in the future, we might even partner with AWS right now with partnered with Google Cloud. So we're building a lot of these features on Google Cloud. And I think the space is enough for a lot of players to compete. What we care about is really that polished end-to-end developer experience.

28:22And we've seen no one do that. Everyone picks a niche to be really good at and we want to be good at the end of the thing. I mean, eventually you could be cloud independent or multi-cloud. And when you click deploy or you want to put into production it could they could compete for your business it could give you three different prices for this right and you could list them in rank order of what it will cost to run these here right and then i believe there are you know i get pitched on this startup all the time hey we'll examine your cloud bill and we'll optimize it by putting you on you know i don't know if they call them second tier servers but maybe not as powerful uh servers and stuff like that, that are unnecessary for your job and just optimize your costs, while not compromising your performance.

29:13All that's a possibility. Yeah. Yeah. And that's it. We got we got we got a deploy going. And you get you get some nice analytics and logs and everything sort of built right in. And, you know, that deploy button could could also go to your VPS or to your internal deployment. I think once we go into the enterprise in the future, if they have on-prem thing, we could also package a container and put it on their on-prem as well. Just mean you compete with like, um, GitHub and those kinds of repositories now and, or, you know, let me show you the community. In addition to a lot of the bounty stuff that we talked about, which is here, you can see all the tasks you can, you can start doing.

29:57Um, And there's also a lot of, you know, a lot of apps inside the Replit community that you can check out, right? Like you can go to this app called Oracle GPT, it's a chat assistant, I can go look at how the developer has built it, I can run it or I can fork it and have and change it. So it adds a layer that GitHub never really added, which is how do you actually run this stuff? And not just view the code and download it locally, but I can actually bring it into my environment and mess with it and publish it. And we have this community where people vote on things and tip each other. And so it adds a layer that I think GitHub never really added.

30:48What about Hugging Face? Are they a competitor to yours now or a coexister? How do you look at Hugging Face? I hear a lot of developers, you know, sort of starting there. Hugging Face, I think they're on Replit. They have some examples on Replit that they built. And you can like fork them and play with them. You know, Jason, the way we think about competition and the way we think about just the landscape in general is that we really want to be the place where people create. And so if you help people create, we want to partner with you. So if you're a hugging face and you're helping people create AI by hosting models and by training models, then developers on Repli should be able to use those models right from hugging face.

31:37So in a lot of ways, Repli becomes this positive sum playground for everyone to play in. And that's really our vision for this company. uh getting more people to become developers and making it easy to onboard have you given thought to that you know i know you had this like great like i don't know if it was 30 days to learn python or 100 days or whatever yeah it's 100 days yeah 100 days like so we have it in hindi too oh wow that's fascinating you know because when i went i did the first couple of days i was like wow this is incredible it is literally walking me through it with a video with the code you know it's almost like a little bit of a game right is this working to getting more young people or even people who are transitioning into being a developer is it is it actually increasing the number of developers in the world or do you kind of think like some people do hey developing is you know a certain type of person digs it and it's not for everybody yeah so i i think about it as sort of these concentric circles right where you know at the very inner part of the circle, you have those, let's call them platform developers.

32:46Typically, you're living in Silicon Valley or Seattle, and you're working on AWS or Google Cloud or one of these hardcore kind of platform companies. You're writing low-level code, right? Then you have a lot of product engineers. Those product engineers are founders, are people working at startups, are full-stack engineers. and I think that that's a lot more accessible than people think it is right if you're a product engineer you you are basically your day-to-day job is waking up in the morning and translating some user demand or user story or something that a pm told you to do or designer told you to do or you're a founder you're trying to meet some some demand in the market into code and code is sort of incidental to your goal.

33:36Your goal is to put software out into the world. Yes. And I think a lot more people can participate in that in a lot of different ways. One is we can make code more accessible and more learnable, and that's what we're doing. Two, I think there's a lot of opportunity for AI to help with this, such as AI is writing the code for you. Three, I think some version of no code might work. I'm not a big fan of the way people are doing it right now because they're basically recreating the programming environment using blocks and things like that, and that's not very scalable. But I think there someone will figure out a no-code environment that actually makes sense.

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34:13Interesting. So let's double click on the no-code piece. Right now is somewhere between a WYSIWYG, what you see is what you get, type environment, you're dragging things around, and then it abstracts the code, and then it writes the code on the back end, you don't get to see it, nor do you need to. And then there's like sort of scripting, hey, if this happens, do this, and it's kind of light, but it is building a whole facade on top of some code base. Yes, is I guess how this is all working. And so you're sort of proposing what? Yeah, so so the way it works is that they have these pre programmed visual components that you are kind of composing together, broadly is how it works.

35:00And you can double click on one of those components and edit some of its features or even write code. And this is where you get into some low code platforms. The problem is that what you want out of your computing environment is to be Turing complete. So Turing completeness is the idea that is the idea of a universal computation is that the computing machine can run any other program that any other computing machine can run, right? So this is a very technical concept, but it basically means that every programming language today that we have that's in use is Turing complete. So Turing completeness is a necessity for this thing to actually encompass all sorts of features that you need in order to build a real world software.

35:47And most of these environments are not Turing complete. If they try to be Turing complete, it becomes really hard to manage. It becomes really wild. It's actually the visual components actually get into the way in the way of actually producing the software. So it's a scalability problem. So you end up either simplifying too much and you're not Turing complete, or if you want to be Turing complete, you run to a scalability problem. So that's really it's sort of a that's why you see a lot of these no-code platform grow really fast and then they hit a ceiling. And then they start growing a lot even as a business.

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38:06So making coding more like talking to the computer, I guess is where this is going to end up and using a natural language known as English to program is how many people in the AI space have been proposing this will end up. Have you used a code interpreter? I have not. You should check it out. I think you would like it. So chat GPT has this mode called code interpreter where you're talking to chat GPT, but behind the scenes, it's writing code and running it to help it answer questions. um and so i have used it yes i've uploaded like csvs to it and then asked the questions about the data that was uploaded because you can use it for that function as well right yeah and that shows you the promise right i mean there there is something there it still hallucinates a little bit and does come some some some some silly things but it seems possible and i think talking to you know i i've been uh reading the new uh steve jobs book uh make something wonderful and i didn't know about that book who wrote that is it so laurine jobs put together all of steve's writings uh for all his lives and in a almost chronological way kind of lays out oh wow his life's where it's amazing it's phenomenal um and uh that's a free ebook look at this this is amazing i yeah steve jobs archive.com yeah make something wonderful steve jobs in its own words wow it's available at apple books or you can just download it for free i had no idea about this okay so continue what did you get out of it i'm a like a big student of computing history and silicon valley history because i think to to to understand where we go from here we have to understand the past and how we arrived here there are a lot of amazing things about how we made computers and technology There are a lot of drawbacks as well.

40:07One of the drawbacks I'm trying to fix is that we've created a generation of computer consumers, not computer programmers and users. Think about how most people use computers today. It's basically a consumption device. You're watching TikTok and YouTube, and maybe it's a communication device. Maybe you're talking, texting. but the original vision for computers is that it augments our intelligence it actually computes for us and we've really lost a little bit of that and so i think steve jobs was uh phenomenal as as a as a designer and entrepreneur uh and really the goat in a lot of ways but some of the decisions they made were obviously guided by this idea that people can't compute or people can't program And actually, there's a line in the book that I found, which I kind of went looking for, which is initially they were having trouble explaining the value proposition behind the Apple II.

41:06Because you buy this thing and you open it up as just a terminal. You don't know what to do with it. And you have to learn basic in order to program it. And what Steve Jobs arrived at is that actually people shouldn't learn how to program. and we need to build UIs and GUI because people should just use computers as opposed to program computers. And that decision put us on this history path of actually users and programmers are separate instead of being one. And I think there's a vision of the future that's a lot more exciting where anyone can be a creator, anyone can use computers to their full power.

41:49yeah and it's i mean you see this in generative ai right so we've been talking about coding this all time but you know if you wanted to be an artist and make a logo you wanted to make the next logo speaking of steve jobs you know this is something that you went to art school for a long time but if you start talking to stable diffusion and some of the other tools out there dolly and you said like hey what are the most iconic logo or you asked chat gpt what are the most iconic logos of all time then you start using stable diffusion to make something you know just based on the creativity in your words you might start to find things or ideas that you wouldn't have thought of this is where like the writer strike when you when you look at the writer strike and they're saying stop we want to ban chat gpt i'm looking at it i'm like no you actually don't you're all using it anyway um and if you go into any of these language models and you start just brainstorming ideas it's just a more efficient way than reading 10 books uh you know about science fiction let's say you can just see which you know tickles your fancy uh in terms of ideas and it's going to come up like you said with hallucinations or bad ideas but that's how you get to great ideas you get through all the bad ones right and that's right you have these jumping off points where you know something sparks your creativity oh yeah what if deckard is a replicant oh that's a great interesting idea you know in blade runner like oh wow spoiler alert um you know these ideas typically come because people are brainstorming smoking a joint or drinking some beers or going for a walk and you know something just pops into their head like it's almost like the hallucination of these language models is a feature it's a feature it's like mimicking these weird moments when people are tripping out you know from their cold bath or from taking mushrooms or going on a hike or taking a shower whatever whatever got their creative juices flowing i think that that might be what's literally happening is we're you know as we recreate this intelligence starting to realize like maybe it's not that unique you know how our brains work maybe there's some magical aspects to it but i almost feel like we're figuring out how our own brains work when we build these things one of one of the reasons i got into computers uh as as a kid was because the you know i've been always into computers but the thing that really attracted me to become a programmer and eventually want to be able to do ai is because i wanted to understand the human mind like it was like it's one of those questions that i can't stop thinking about what makes us us what makes us thinking beings and i think once you understand all these things, you kind of start to potentially understand the meaning of things, which is a very existential drive in me to actually try to understand, you know, what makes humans humans.

44:38And I think there's the there's what's called in philosophy, the hard problem of consciousness, we can't really probe consciousness, because it is inabsorbable from a scientific point of view, you can have a complete description of the brain, but you can't really understand what's going on inside. Whereas now that we have these machines, we can actually try to probe them from the inside in interesting ways. Actually, a lot of neuroscience now is making its way back into AI. One of the ways people are playing with AIs is, what happens if we turn off this neuron? What happens if we turn off this layer?

45:17What happens? I think they're called ablations. It's kind of like you're running this process to be able to judge performance based on different ways the neural network is structured. And I think you're right, that starts to give us some understanding of how intelligence works. And I think that's really exciting. And it'd be great, it'd be really great if philosophers, if a lot of people from the liberal arts side of humanity is actually interested in these things, because that's that's an exciting moment it's kind of disheartening that a lot of artists are offended by it or or are not really excited by it but hoping they would come around to it yeah and we have some corollaries in psychology and brain science you know you have these uh what they call it split hemispheres where people have had their hemisphere split or you know twin studies you have all these like interesting you know people have different damage that has occurred to their brain tragically and we started to figure out just through those biological circumstances you know some of the oddities of the human brain and consciousness and how we perceive the world right um have you seen have you seen this um really wild video where you know if you have epilepsy one way to cure it is you you sever the hemispheres yeah uh and so that way the epilepsy doesn't travel back and forth and there was a video on youtube about a guy with a severed hemisphere and they were trying to kind of probe and understand like what happens to humans when we actually sever the light left and right uh sections of our brains and and the experiments were fascinating so basically they gave each eye different video feed um i think the the The right eye is connected to the left hemisphere and the left eye is connected to the right hemisphere.

47:16One of them is the language center. I forgot which. But you basically give an instruction to the non-language center, like go to this side of the room and grab this other thing. And you don't give that instruction to the other side. The side is able to talk. The subject actually stands up and walks over to that side of the room. and the experimenters will ask him like why did you go there and he would hallucinate because he did he doesn't have in that side of the brain that talks doesn't have the information to be able to say i was told to go there and so he hallucinates oh i want to go to the bathroom yeah and that's really fascinating that's wild yeah he's basically taking the next guess like we were talking about with auto complete like why would i get up well the bathroom's in that direction and so that's the next possible word you know i'd love to invite you to dinner the movies like what are the possibilities here could be getting a a glass of water i could be going to the bathroom it's probably one of those uh two yeah it's it's really fascinating how quickly this is all uh happening i'm curious your thoughts on like what are you seeing internally with your team i don't know how many developers you have on your team but you got a front row seat you guys are obviously uh all true believers in using you know these ghost riders and co-pilots and and using ai what has the last year been like in terms of your team's productivity and and how much are you embracing ai and running replant you know the again on an individual developer perspective we see our developers are a lot more engaged a lot happier and a lot excited about writing code because, you know, it just removes a lot of the drudgery of writing code.

49:09On a kind of a company scale level, I don't think we've seen a huge productivity improvement. And again, that's because the thing that is lost between actually writing the code and actually deploying a product is everything that happens in between that AI hasn't touched yet. And this is why we're really excited about it. Because even if you make the individual developer slightly more productive by making it easier to generate code, it still doesn't translate very well for it to be perceptible from a CEO point of view. In a solo entrepreneur perspective, it 100 % is. And what we're seeing of our customers, I mean, we have this guy on Twitter, actually, he built a 250k ARR business on Replit.

50:05And he didn't know how to write any code coming into this. He just used ChapGPT and Replit and Ghostwriter and other tools to kind of figure out how to write the code himself. He doesn't even know how to use Git. And he built this huge business for himself doing that. And obviously, that would not be possible without AI. We're seeing all these stories of solo entrepreneurs or small companies getting a lot of benefit out of this. But for it to actually move the GDP or even smaller move, move like productivity of the tech industry as a whole, there's still a lot more work to be done. So people enjoying the job more, maybe some products are shipping faster.

50:44Are you seeing that yet? The products are shipping faster or maybe not? we were known for being super fast already as a as a classies and that's over there yeah so uh you know it wasn't that uh perceptible there's definitely it definitely feels like we're prototyping things a lot faster ah and there's there's a lot of prototypes flying around on goal maybe shots on goal that's right and you know instead of getting in a meeting and talking about an idea you get actually a prototype pretty quickly oh that's very well see this is so powerful that maybe we're like you and i are agreeing so quickly on it but it's that's super profound if people are coming to the meeting instead of saying we should build this or saying i built this and then two other people say i built this well now you as the ceo or the management team we're going to look at the three ideas and say okay let's test this one then we'll test this one yeah and then our designers this one yeah our designers are shipping these replete links between each other and i see a designer instead of waiting for the engineer to do this thing they'll just like post like here's here's the new repli link for for my change for my css change or my visual change so definitely seeing that velocity of ideas and prototype uh inside the company it's almost like if we were running a restaurant you would be you know having people instead of like coming and say hey i want to try a duck dish or whatever they should be coming and be like here's the finished dish or here's like a approximation of my new deconstructed you know peaking duck and then everybody just tasted it yeah you know what we should keep pulling that string and see where it leads us i think that's like if you think about the nature of startups and finding product market fit and product velocity that's really a game changer um that's perhaps more important than shipping fast to your point is you know the other day i was talking to um jack dorsey came and visited a repli he's a repli user he's really excited about it and he said something that in the early days of Square, every time they wanted to trial a new design, they would have to ship the design to China to fabricate and come back.

52:48And then they started investing in 3D printing. And that increased the product velocity so much such that designs were changing every day and they were getting the right thing faster. And he equated what we're doing to software as to 3D printing. Yeah, that makes total sense and if you think like he's been such a great entrepreneur i just had ruloff on the from sequoia on the program and they started with you know small to medium-sized businesses even people in flea markets just you know being able to take credit cards for the first time instead of cash and sending people to a cash machine with a seven dollar fee in some bodega or something to like yeah you can just take any credit card um and fire that up and then he was so bold he's like you know what i'd like to do is um i'd like to create a second product inside this company just for consumers cash app boom and now cash app is this gigantic business it's huge well he's the third business uh jason that nobody's talking about their bitcoin business yeah explain yeah the last quarter i think they saw three billion dollars in revenue obviously it's still not monetizable revenue but three billion dollars in bitcoin volume yeah volume right which is which is wild um and and now they're building uh their tbd product which is still still tbd in progress but the idea is to just make it such that you know you can move bitcoin across the globe really easily and so that square and cash app can sit on this bitcoin rails and be accessible all over the globe and i think that's a really huge vision yeah and that really is like shots on goal you know and uh that's the thing that's going to just keep increasing uh with tools like that's what gets me excited about technology i mean i think i think the tech industry got a little boring towards the last uh decade towards the last part of the last decade last cycle yeah like 2017 18 19 everybody's making like you know like the next app that's already existed 20 times yeah Or the next SaaS thing.

54:58And it became very formulaic. And I think now we're back into a period of innovation where we're going to actually be able to lift the common human being and be able to supply them with tools and intelligence and computation and really try to make the world a better place. And kind of go back to this roots of like, you know, it just became cliche almost to say you were here to make the world a better place. but I think that's really why I'm here and why I'm doing what I'm doing at replet. Yeah. You know, it's like, it's so wild when a new paradigm shift happens now that I've lived through so many of them, like I, I, I expect them to happen.

55:38And then I just understand how they kind of go through the hype cycle and everything. You know, it's mobile or cloud or crypto and now AI. And it's really like a chance to take things that exist in the world already and just make them phenomenally better because this new platform technology technique however you want to frame you know cloud computing etc and you think about something like youtube and i was talking to roll off about this as well in this episode that's coming out on this week startups where you know he did that youtube investment and you know nobody wanted to invest in youtube everybody thought it was stupid people who had a lot of experience like mark cuban are like yeah i don't think netflix and youtube are going to work because you're going to flood spot was i think storage had gotten so much cheaper in cloud computing and then bandwidth was getting more efficient compression algorithms that actually you could let people upload videos and get as many views as they want and just for a couple of low dollar cpm be able to actually break even and then eventually make money right even with the amount think about the just insane amount of uploads that happened on youtube and how that was burning just mountains of cash mountains of cash being burned for storage for dropbox and for for at least dropbox had you know a paid version and a cap but youtube didn't have a cap you just keep uploading videos there's a really sort of dangerous crazy prospect now you look at ai um you know it's like a in hollywood there's a piece of software called final draft i don't know if you're aware of that where like people write screenplays in final draft and uh you know had a startup um make a version of final draft it's called cyberfilm uh dot ai and uh they have this tool called saga and you can go make your own uh screenplay uh and then make what do you call them uh storyboards and stuff like storyboards and like somebody who feels intimidated by writing a screenplay can be like i want to write something like natural born killers or reservoir dogs but i want it to have an indian cast and i want it to take place in india and i want it to revolve around this or that and you know kind of adapt it make it your own i want to make a sci-fi version of reservoir dogs like i'm down with that yeah make me a sci-fi version of reservoir dogs let's you know start your creative juices or whatever and that'd be fun actually yeah we're kind of actually yeah i mean this is what i mean you look at star wars it was a sci-fi version of you know kurosawa's work you know in samurai films and stuff like that so you know why not let's let's go right and it's like a chance to just start again over again with this new technology you know and you start having i think i think hollywood is getting remade from the ground up with this with this technology i i just uh uh i just invested in this uh yc company called kino ai what are they doing what do they do you know I'm going to explain in my own words because they'll probably use different words but they actually make all the video archive at all these big studios usable because they index them and they put a search engine on top of them and they index every frame and so you can go and search for you know every explosion and whatever studio and look at all the footage they had yeah and coming in this software media media asset management so like cnn has all this footage from you know uh anderson cooper show you know right and they may not have ever used they may have used 10 of the other 90 are sitting it's not utilized on a hard drive it's not utilized uh yeah do you know adam curtis no adam curtis is a really awesome bbc uh documentary filmmaker Oh, yes.

59:35Century of the Self, Hypernormalization. Hypernormalization, I know, yeah. Yeah, basically, this guy goes into the BBC archives, sits there for a year and looks at a bunch of footage, and then cuts together a story with a voiceover and creates this amazing documentaries. And so imagine all this footage could be now accessed and indexed and repurposed and probably using generative AI also completed and remixed and all that stuff. So I think it's really exciting what's going to go on. If they will adopt it, if they won't, they will get disrupted. If you haven't seen hyper normalization, it is a trippy movie.

1:00:17All this stuff is trippy. By the way, one about our industry that really is not, people have not really seen it, I think, is... Is it by him? Yeah, all watched over by machines of love and grace. And it talks about early optimism in Silicon Valley. It talks about the cybernetic movement and about the ideas they had about how to structure society and some of the cults they made and all that stuff. It's a really interesting documentary. And the name of that one is... All Watched Over by Machines of Love and Grace. All Watched Over by Machines of Love and Grace, 2011. Wow. I didn't know about that one.

1:01:04I'm going to watch that. That's a perfect one for me to watch. Yeah. I mean, we're talking about the history of this, the technology industry. These guys were all on acid and mushrooms and coming out of the hippie zippy movement. and they really were opening the doors of perception and then they were with computers at the same time yeah and you know imagine you're tripping on acid and you know you're also like using new technology for the first time you're like hey i have some interesting ideas here we should make a mouse it's like what a mouse what yeah it's like a little thing you move it around it moves the pointer like literally a lot of these innovations happen from 60s radicals you know um you know coming up with really interesting ideas of what could happen i mean steve job said that was a major part of his journey was you know opening up the doors of perception i don't know the full extent of his drug use or tripping but it was not insignificant from what i understand it was not uh there's a guy called bill atkinson who was part of the original mac team and he built uh the system called hypercard which is a lot of ways is early replet um and we actually talked to him at replet we uh and he he lives uh he lives here and um yeah he just talked about how it all started with a trip yeah i'm reading his page right he said he had an acid trip and he built hypercard it was hilarious i actually didn't know that you should have him on i think he would come yeah that would be dope um uh i remember hypercard it was like here's how to order it's like kind of like a database and here's how to organize information it kind of had the concept of hyperlinks in it too right like you could jump from card to card and yeah fascinating this idea was in the air there was actually like the web ended up winning but the web was actually the least sophisticated of all the different ideas uh around hyper hyper media at the time yeah people forget the even the term hypermedia but this idea that in a way there was a very cool piece of software called the brain um and it was mind mapping software and if you go to thebrain.com it still exists and uh i remember knowing the founders from the 90s and the product was really simple um here i'll show you uh this was like a really trippy piece of software and i used it for years i wish i had mine because you would basically yeah it would make a mental map you see it there on the screen yeah and you know ai would do a really wonderful job of this of just taking our conversation here and then any other conversation happening on podcasts and if we hit on hypercard or hypermedia making jumps between all the pockets it'd be a great startup by the way you just take all the podcasts in the world and make them a a brain map of them.

1:03:57And the idea here was people with quick keys and Jenny Jardin and I used to play with the software and we would sit and work and put it up on the screen when we had ideas for conferences and stuff like that. And we'd make these maps where you would jump from like product design. And then you click on something over here and click on something over here. And it would just load web pages associated with each of the neurons. If you think about this, like a neural net or your brain, and it's kind of forgotten mind mapping, but jury, not jury Colonna jury, Makowski from least 1.0 which was esther dyson's newsletter jerry mcowski had kept creating jerry mcowski's brain um and uh he would publish it publicly of all the things that were in his brain which is just a mind map you know uh there was a recent resurgence around uh rome rome research yes uh the backlinks and things like that but uh and they're great and these softwares are are continuing to develop and get better but one thing that i found unattractive for my usage is how laborious it is like how i have to create these backlinks right like you have to do like you know double brackets to create a new topic yes and then you have to do all that i'm like well just do it for me like just yeah well i mean the co-pilot should be doing this like you're going to be better at it than i am and you just look at this here it's like this is jerry mcowski's brain i don't know if he keeps up with this but it's like news about using my brain using starting points and understanding jerry's brain uh beginners whatever here you can use jerry's brain uh getting started points uh big questions okay i don't know what's in jerry's brain around big questions but that seems interesting challenges for kids you know and all these things would be uh i don't even know if this works anymore but he uh you can see like you could jump off on all it was almost like his bookmarks and stream of consciousness um really interesting you have people out there founders like we'll back your startup make something interesting like this yeah i mean uh this idea of being able to generate a map directly out of a conversation seems like a no-brainer someone should go build that oh you know what look it just did it it must have been his brain is so big that it wasn't working and i just assumed it was loading it was loading look i clicked on different types of capitalism and he has like climate capitalism clean capitalism coin flip capitalism cognitive capitalism uh democracy and let's go yeah i mean it's it's crazy um you know the cool thing about this is like his grand grandchildren could actually like instantiate this in some kind of like ai that can talk to you and actually be able to talk as if it's jerry and in a way that creates something that could outlive you that could you know create your wisdom um encapsulate your wisdom for people to see in the future uh it's crazy yeah i mean it'd be when neural link comes out and you can actually put these categories together and it just your brain kind of maps itself automatically i mean scary but it's definitely the possibilities there all right listen i can talk to you for hours and i did again uh everybody if you're interested go to replet if you want to post some bounties and have it done quick cheap faster better cheaper you know it's very few things that are faster better cheaper and if you're not using replets bounty program or their ghostwriter you're a dummy this is how your startup could go at least 50 faster so instead of just like hiring a bunch of offshore developers nothing wrong with that or you know sitting there wondering when you're going to get this uh latest bit of code or feature done put it up on the bounty program see how you do i think you're going to go learn how to code everybody go learn how to code i mean i got three kids i got i was like literally i was like oh my god if i go down this rabbit hole this is going to be 20 hours a week no no i need to sleep i need to spend more time with my kids i got the guilt trip like oh this is like some crazy video game that's going to take over my life and you got you got three podcasts and all that yeah i get two podcasts and i'm trying to get the podcast to be less per week but with um even better guests like i was doing the news every day and like i was really getting into it but then i was like you know what the news is transient and i'm not enjoying it as much and so i really got focused on how you stopped that news thing i do like news once a week on all in and then i do a little bit of new i'll do a news program on this week and start it's been instead of doing news every day i was like let's just get you know three times a week you know legendary or emerging founders and then one day a week do the news right and then yeah it's maybe a little bit of a better balance but i also have to enjoy doing the pod and like talking to you and then just jumping off points and talking about the future and then meeting new entrepreneurs that's really the heart and soul of this week in startups and i kind of reverted it back uh to also for my energy you know like i have to want to come do this and we're at 1800 episodes like i don't know if i'm going to make it to 2000 if i'm not super compelled by the conversation i need to be compelled by the conversation so you know that's that's an interesting i don't know if it's about getting older but i started reasoning a lot more from this point of view of like do i want to do this for 10 years uh right and and a lot of decisions that dropped become a lot easier because i'm like oh i want to build this company forever for as long as I can do that.

1:09:37If I want to do that, I want to make decisions that optimize for the long term. And there are things that you will get pleasure from, and then things that you will consider chores, and then things that you will consider painful. And when it's something that delights you, you run to it. I couldn't wait to get on the call with you. When it's things that you don't like, you avoid them. And then it's chores, you do some combination of avoiding or doing them poorly. or and that's where like being a great manager is just hiring people you know if you're a founder who look at your chores or things you hate as the things they love and they run towards and they get joy from so like i have people who get joy from you know you know managing complex operational processes and that gives them fulfillment god bless them not me but there are people who love ops and they just thrive in ops or people love sales you know and i i think gotta also like optimize for you wanting to get to the office every day and you know get on slack every day and enjoy it right yeah yeah life is short yeah all right we'll talk to you all next time bye-bye

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Today’s show:

Replit CEO Amjad Masad joins Jason to discuss the latest developments in IDEs (3:04), leveraging AI for coding (11:48), Replit’s Ghostwriter (23:40), and much more!

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Time stamps:

(0:00) Replit CEO Amjad Masad joins Jason

(3:04) The origin of integrated development environments (IDEs) uses and importance for developers

(6:44) IntelliSense, Replit's Ghostwriter and other debugging tools

(10:28) LinkedIn Jobs - Post your first job for free at https://linkedin.com/twist

(11:48) Leveraging AI in suggestion tools and coding platforms

(14:17) The role of autonomous agents in startup development

(19:20) Replit's Bounties platform and Replit's mission to build artificial developer intelligence (ADI)

(22:25) .Tech Domains - Apply to get your startup featured on This Week in Startups at https://startups.tech/jason

(23:40) Amjad Masad demos Replit's Ghostwriter and other apps

(31:46) Getting more people to become developers and low-code platforms

(36:35) Supergut - Get 25% off with code TWIST at https://supergut.com

(38:06) “Make Something Wonderful” Steve Jobs in his own words

(43:56) The human mind and the origin of Amjad's passion for computers

(48:22) Embracing AI and the resulting changes at Replit

(55:27) Paradigm shifts in Hollywood and tech

(1:03:06) thebrain.com

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