After nine years of grinding, Replit found its market. Can it keep it?

>Rather than becoming defensive, Masad and his team owned the problem. In fact, says Masad, within two days, they rolled out an automatic safety system that separates a user’s “practice” database from their “real” one. The way Masad describes it, it’s a little like having two versions of a website’s filing cabinet — the AI agent can experiment freely in a development database, but the production database, which is the real thing that users interact with, is completely walled off.

I gotta wonder who the median techcrunch reader is if the writer/editor felt it necessary to explain the point of having a staging and prod environment, and with such a pointless analogy. We surely cannot understand what a database is unless we're told it's like a filing cabinet, right?

personally, the evolution of replit makes me sad. i remember writing some of my very first ever programs in python using replit in middle school, as it wasn't blocked by the school network and it was the best way of running arbitrary code online back then. i used it to execute java code for AP computer science in high school, and i improved a ton at using the terminal as well. At some point, I stopped using the replit web editor and was coding by full-screening the built-in terminal and using vim. it was a formative experience and really helped me develop as a programmer even though all i had access to was a locked-down chromebook. but now, going back to the website and seeing the first thing it shows to you is how you can "build apps using AI", not even being able to even create an environment to run some python code without talking to an LLM, and the company focusing on ARR and becoming "AI-native" and creating value and all that jazz, and it feels like the magic of learning to code for the first time has been lost. luckily, kids these days are spoiled with webassembly and can run pretty much whatever they want in the browser, so i'm sure the next generation of young programmers will be alright

You don't write for your median reader, you write for the vast majority of your readers.

That's a basic concept of writing. Journalism should be accessible, so even if you know what a database is and how to deploy it in different envs, you shouldn't write assuming that. If a large portion of your readers don't know what you're saying, you've failed as a writer. If your readership includes high school students, you write with that as the baseline.

Richard Feynman certainly didn't write as if he assumed the reader knew particle physics. Be like Richard Feynman.

I've used Replit for educational materials when teaching beginners Python and JavaScript. They had a nice product called Teams for Education. It was even announced that it'll become fully free (the original blog post with the announcement was deleted from their website) [0], but soon after that the company had pivoted to AI and later discontinued the Teams for Education completely [1].

I also used Replit's embedded widgets for occasional lessons, but they kept changing the UI and behavior, making it difficult to write consistent reliable documentation for beginners.

I think by now it's clear that the product is not meant for educators, like it was originally, so that's ok.

[0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20240924020257/https://blog.repl...

[1]: https://blog.replit.com/update-on-teams-for-education

Richard Feynman didn’t use poor analogies.

'Poor' is subjective. Some might even use it to describe your comment.

Ironically, especially when you combine it with the em-dash, it really sounds like exactly the type of completely pointless and unilluminating analogy that LLMs love to generate. These analogies are essentially a bridge between two concepts, much like how a physical bridge connects two pieces of land separated by water, except in this case the 'water' is understanding and the bridge doesn't actually help you cross it.

To be fair, this was an indirect quote from a founder trying to make programming accessible to "white-collar employees with no technical background".

The bigger question here is why prod/staging wasn't an obvious design choice in the first place!

Sounds like these guys kind of flailed around for almost a decade and then jumped on the AI bandwagon. Nothing wrong with that, I’m just surprised someone decided to bankroll them for so long. Also not sure how successful they’ll be long term, since they’re presumably a wrapper around one of the big three in a highly competitive space.

If the median has half the users over it and half under it, wouldn’t writing for most of your readers be very close to writing for the median? If we are aiming for 51% (most readers). Most readers is somewhere between 50% and under 100%.

I appreciate the idea, but I think there are always assumptions. Like you did not explain what the median is because this is hn. I like the standars of the economist, always saying what an acronym is on first usage, and what a company is (Google, a search company). What they dont do is say: Google, like a box where you enter what you want to find and points you to other boxes. That would be condescending for its readers I believe. It is a matter of taste, and not objective, I guess.

I don't think they can keep it. What they have has already been replicated by the big guys, with just maybe a few months delay. It seems like they're usually going in the right direction, even ahead of others, but it's usually not any massive breakthrough, they're just being good at executing quickly the natural next steps.

I'm not sure if any of my coworkers has ever properly used a filing cabinet

I've seen bots promoting Replit on Steam forums of indie games.

If this is the way they are marketing their product, I don't see it as having a future. What I've seen in the Dwarf Fortress forums alone makes me want to avoid the company with a 10' pole.

Let us not forget how replit tried to cancel Riju (an open source project from one of the early devs which does something similar)

Edit: looks like they succeeded or the author moved on

Chuck Norris doesn't even NEED analogies. He explains the original problem so hard that you understand it without reference to a similar but more familiar situation.

Chuck Norris would probably have mentioned "dev" and "production" and never needed to discuss furniture used for stacking open-faced envelopes for holding papers.

> I’m just surprised someone decided to bankroll them for so long.

When you are PROFITABLE (but not as profitable as your investors would like) you can run FOREVER without anyone "bankrolling" you. It's a foreign concept in the AI world (and sometimes it feels like it's foreign to the tech startup world) but quite effective.

That would be writing for most users but barely. I think there’s a fair reason they said “vast majority” instead.

Spreadsheet would have been the better analogy.

Even if you are profitable your investors could pressure you to exit to some other company so that they can recoup their investment. But I doubt they were profitable. Going by the article they had about 100 employees and about $2M in revenue before they downsized. Assuming a median salary of $100k that would put their payroll alone at $10M. But the napkin math is kinda beside the point because they did keep raising money [1].

[1] https://pitchbook.com/profiles/company/113831-02

Let's not forget this gem here [1].

Tells you everything you need to know about the company and its leadership.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27424195

They are working at a too competitive area. Techs changed, and everything should re-start from scratch. Nine years may mean nothing at all.

What, college students with credits who haven't figured out docker yet?

He threatened the ex-intern by saying they have "a lot of money to pay for top lawyers" (goodness!), the incident gathered a lot of attention, got caught, and was forced to say sorry.

Replit is in the news because of the Vercel fiasco. And it's jarring because of how they've tried to take advantage of that situation.

I don’t think “vast majority” has a rigid definition, but I’d put it closer to 95% than 51%.

For example, in the senate passing with 51 votes is a “simple majority”.

> median techcrunch reader

Is probably a consumer tech enthusiast and not a software developer.

I am not sure the post said "vast majority" originally, to be fair. Is there a way to check?

This is all highly personal, so just banter'ing, but:

I agree there's no clear definition but 95% is even beyond "overwhelming majority" to me (with overwhelming being greater than vast). I'd call that "near totality".

Maybe, at least for US contexts, "vast" should line up with "filibuster-proof"? Eg 60-65%? 75% at most.

Of course, then that doesn't tell me anything about what it should mean in other contexts.

Vercel fiasco?

I think you're unaware of how vast vast is!

Personally, I feel vast is used to refer to things that 'appear limitless' e.g. vast desert, or when describing easily bound things - like percentages - to be almost complete.

Looking around it seems there is some debate on this, but it tends to end up suggesting the higher numbers:

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/vast_majority - puts vast as 75-99%

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39222264 - puts vast as greater than 75% (I can't tell if the top comment is a joke or there really is some form of ANSI guidance on this).

But to find a more compelling source I've taken a look at the UK's Office for National Statistic's use of the term. While they don't seem to have guidance in their service manual (https://service-manual.ons.gov.uk/) a quick term limited search of actual ONS publications show:

* https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsde...

- "The vast majority (99.1%) of married couples were of the opposite sex"

- "In this bulletin, we cover families living in households, which covers the vast majority of families. " - this is high 90's by a quick google elsewhere.

* https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/housing/...

- "The vast majority of households across England and Wales reported that they had central heating in 2021 (98.5%, 24.4 million)."

* https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsde...

- "The vast majority (93.0%) lived in care homes."

This seems to put vast in the 90%+ category. There is certainly more analysis that can be done here though, as I have only sampled and haven't looked at the vast majority of publications.

(this was fun, I don't mean to come over as pedantic)

You should be grateful and happy for the people that helped you in your journey, they made it! You know, apps are not AI (yet), what you used for free was built by someone that deserves the success.

A-grade c*nt.

They are merely quoting the analogy from Masad — for whom it makes sense if they are targeting nontechnical users and not professional developers anymore.

The CEO thought it a good idea to take a beaming selfie with Netenyahu and then post it to X

I took it for a spin spin to build a simple task manager. It worked for 45 minutes, built half the solution and then asked me for money. Compared to the other options in this space, it seems like an expensive solution.

If OpenAI and Anthropic's models are good enough at coding to make coding agents useful for non-technical employees Replit is targeting, why can't either of those companies use their AI to build a wrapper around their product as good or better than Replit? Has this guy never taken n -> infinity in a problem before?

Well done

I think your username checks out. :D

Apparently I underestimated vastness.

Write for your median reader, and the bottom half will stop reading you. Problem solved.

Got it. I was going to say it sounds like less than a fiasco but I see this is in context of someone criticizing the Replit CEO for a specific action so now I get it. Apologies for being dense. It's a reminder that people leading companies are just people. And if we have a purity test on everyone we better be prepared to have a purity test on ourselves. And not just in our own eyes but in the eyes of everyone else. And that's where it quickly falls apart.

Chuck Norris doesn’t use AI, AI uses Chuck Norris.

OpenAI taking an interest wouldn't be so bad for Replit. Since YC boasts that being incestuous is an upside of YC, ie selling your product to other YC companies, it is possible that OpenAI does the decent thing an outright buys Replit. It is rather likely that Altman and Masad have some sort of relationship going back to their YC days.

But that’s true of everything we use. Someone made that fork you use. That plate. The shoes you wear. Same for an app. You don’t deserve anything. If you make something, and release it into the world, you have a responsibility. Not a reward. A reward may come. People may pay you for your services or your novelty but in no way shape or form are you deserving of it. Deserving of something is a 3rd person observation. You can not demand that you deserve anything.

> But that’s true of everything we use. Someone made that fork you use

I paid a fair price for my forks and plates and shoes, I don't need to be grateful for that. Using a platform for free and then complaining that now they focus on making money is not the same.

> Deserving of something is a 3rd person observation. You can not demand that you deserve anything.

I'm not OP nor Replit owner.

I agree so much with this. I used Replit extensively to prototype things in different languages and share my work with my teammates, who could then suggest tweaks to my ideas. We never came close to the limits of the free tier, but I paid for it anyway because I loved the product.

The magic is definitely gone.

Is miss repl.it for what it used to be, just a quick way to play with a bit of code.

Sad to see https://riju.codes offline. Cant resolve DNS.

Last push to main was 2 months ago so there's hope: https://github.com/radian-software/riju