Replit’s CEO on building a company that can run itself

Disclosure: my fiancé works at Anthropic, whose models Replit uses and which Masad discusses below.

Last week on the Platformer podcast, Granola's Chris Pedregal told me we are only 5 percent into the AI transformation of work. For the fourth episode of our miniseries on productivity in the AI era, I wanted to talk to someone who is trying to speed up the process — building an AI tool for writing software, and a company that can increasingly run itself.

Amjad Masad is the co-founder and CEO of Replit, which he started in 2016 with his wife, the designer Haya Odeh. Masad grew up in Amman, Jordan, in a family with Palestinian roots, and sold software for managing local internet cafés while still a teenager. He came to the United States to be a founding engineer at Codecademy, and went on to run JavaScript infrastructure at Facebook before becoming a founder.

Replit started as a website where beginners could run code in a browser without having to install anything. Today it uses the more familiar chatbot model: you type a sentence, and an agent does everything else — designing, writing, testing, deploying, and hosting your application. 

This year, the meteoric rise of vibe coding — a term Masad hates — has transformed the company's fortunes. In March, Replit raised $400 million at a $9 billion valuation — triple what it was worth six months earlier. The company says more than 50 million people build on it, including 85 percent of the Fortune 500, and that it's on track for $1 billion in annual recurring revenue by the end of this year. (That’s up from $2.8 million in revenue in all of 2024.)

Last month, Replit published a claim that caught my attention: that its engineers nearly tripled the amount of code each person ships in just six months, while preserving the quality of its code, thanks to the rollout of agents throughout the company. It’s an effort to build what Masad calls the "self-driving company," and he walked me through how it works: bringing on engineers who "only look at the code when it's about to get deployed," deploying an internal bot that serves as "the brain of the company," and adopting a management philosophy in which "a CEO is a kind of glorified router" whose routing functions should mostly be automated away. Replit has begun canceling its own software contracts along the way, replacing most of its analytics vendors with tools its employees built themselves. (He wasn’t quite ready to name names, though, telling me he felt bad for the companies.)

Replit, like some of its peers, is also expanding beyond coding tasks. Last month the company launched Replit Design, an agent-based creative tool. Masad told me that Kimi K3, a model from the Chinese lab Moonshot AI that is available in Replit Design, "is actually now a better designer than Claude."

Masad admits to having mixed feelings about the way AI is changing work. After spending 15 years making coding easier to learn, he now tells people not to bother learning it at all. "As an entrepreneur, you have to be honest with yourself," he told me. "Otherwise the company would die." 

When I asked my standard question about AI job losses, Masad gave one of the more candid answers I've heard from a CEO in this miniseries. "Net net, there's going to be more jobs, but also there's going to be more companies," he said. "But companies will get smaller, and they will do layoffs — 100 percent sure." He paired that certainty with sympathy for the people on the receiving end, calling it "cruel" to tell workers in their 50s to retrain — a job he assigns to a government he says isn't thinking about the problem.

I also asked Masad to grade the prediction Raycast's Thomas Paul Mann made on this show: that within three years, up to half the software on your computer will be apps you made yourself. Masad went further, in a direction that he admitted might undermine his own business: "In three years, we'll be using fewer apps, we'll be using more agents, and those agents will be using the apps on our behalf." In his telling, the app itself — the thing Replit exists to help you build — is an intermediate step that agents will increasingly skip. It's a vision that seems plausible to me: the companies selling us tools to make software are already planning for a world where software starts to disappear, and where agents with Visa-powered wallets transact with other agents while we're not looking. 

A long excerpt of our conversation is below, edited for clarity and length. Listen to the entire conversation wherever you get your podcasts — just search for Platformer — or watch it on YouTube at youtube.com/caseynewton. And let us know what you think — we welcome your feedback at casey@platformer.news.

Casey Newton: Replit is one of the biggest names in vibe coding, but I know you don't like the term. Why does it grate?

Amjad Masad: It was never about coding. It's always about solving problems, about creating things — making software, making apps, making games. The whole mission of Replit was always to make it so that anyone can get access to this technology. This technology has always been accessible to 0.5% of the human population, those who could afford a computer science degree. When you put “coding” in the name, you're immediately signaling to people that they have to learn something complicated. Of course, you put "vibe" in front of it, and maybe that makes it a little more digestible. But still, I talk to a lot of people, and they're just like, "Yeah, I'm not into coding." Well, have you tried vibe coding? "Well, yeah, it is coding. I'm not a coder."

And the other thing is, all of AI is vibe coding at this point. Any AI work app — all these things, they're writing code under the hood. What we realized at Replit early on is that coding is the substrate, the infrastructure that makes AI really powerful. So we'd rather think about Replit as a general problem solver, as a creativity engine.

Newton: As a non-technical person who now has two apps on my Mac that I made by typing into a box, I almost want to go the opposite direction and tell people I'm a 10x software engineer.

Masad: So interesting you're saying that. Not only a 10x software engineer — I think in the future you're going to be a 10x mathematician. I think you're going to be a 10x biologist. I think you'd be a 10x machine learning researcher.

Take me, for example. I've always been into AI theory and the future of AI, but I was never a researcher. I don't know how to construct a neural network from scratch. So I was like, okay, AI has gotten really good at software. Can it do other things? I was getting into chess around the same time, at the very old, ripe age of 38, and I've been getting humiliated by 3- and 4-year-olds online. So the challenge I gave myself was: can you create a fully neural-network-based chess engine? Most chess engines are hybrid — like AlphaGo, AlphaZero — part neural network, part traditional programming and search, and if you look at the literature, it's actually kind of an unsolved problem. I was able to train one, and I put it on Lichess. It's got an Elo score of 1300 — and when it's playing against humans, actually 1700.

It's sort of like in The Matrix, when they ask Neo if he knows how to fly an airplane, and he lags a little bit and says, I know how to fly a helicopter. I feel like I have the same power. I have this genius intern that's also really sloppy and bad at ideas, and I have to direct it, but I can do anything.

Newton: You've said publicly that it no longer makes sense for most people to learn how to code — which is interesting, because you were a founding engineer at Codecademy, a company that taught people exactly that. What was the moment you decided the old way was over?

Masad: My journey in thinking about coding education starts really young. I learned a bit of programming when I was 7 or 8, growing up in Jordan in the '90s, and the thing that really annoyed me was the minutiae of programming — all this annoying stuff that should be automated. That's the spark of the idea.

The stories we heard at Codecademy were amazing: “I learned a little coding, I used to be a fitness instructor, and now I built my fitness app and I'm making $10,000 a month.” But the coding aspect fits a certain personality. You have to have a high tolerance for pain, and no matter how much we made Codecademy easier, it was still not attracting the general population. So when I went to start Replit, the idea was to blur the distinction between learning and building. There shouldn't be a learning step and then a building step. You should just go straight to building.

Without AI, that's actually incredibly hard. But I always thought the key was NLP. No one says NLP anymore, but LLMs came out of natural language processing, and when I saw GPT-2 in 2019 I thought, oh, we're getting close. We have these new machines that could understand human language — surely we can translate that into code. I wrote an article on our blog in 2020 saying we're on the verge of solving programming — that for the foreseeable future you still need to learn to code, but you have to learn less and less of it. I was on YC's podcast and they called it Amjad's Law: the returns on learning to program are doubling month over month. Which was true up to a point.

Now, in 2025, when we started getting Opus and the new Claude models, I was like, okay, I need to be honest with myself. My entire life mission around teaching people coding is changing. You don't need to code anymore. And I started building things without looking at the code — this was before Karpathy even coined “vibe coding.” So I was on TBPN, and I said it. It was actually kind of a painful moment, because here you are, you dedicated your life — I've been working on making coding easier for literally 15 years, most of my adult life — and I'm saying everything that I worked toward is kind of moot, and the way forward is that we make programming so easy that anyone could do it.

That was hugely controversial. A lot of engineers on Twitter and Hacker News attacked me: why do you say this? It's not true. You're going to get people in trouble because they're going to build apps that are insecure. 

And I was like, well, any problem AI could create, AI could solve. We could create a security agent. None of their concerns were actually unsolvable. And lo and behold, here we are, mid-2026, and most engineers — not just vibe coders like you and I — most engineers don't look at the code. I talk to engineers at our company, and they only look at the code when it's about to get deployed. They do a code review, and increasingly we're automating the code review process as well. But as an entrepreneur, you have to be honest with yourself. Otherwise the company would die, and you would not be aligned with the future.

Newton: I wonder how much of this applies to design. In June, I interviewed Figma CEO Dylan Field, who said designers have never had a brighter future. You all just released Replit Design, which promises to automate a lot of the design process. Is design about to hit that same moment coding did?

Masad: Arguably it already did. When I look at how designers work at Replit — when we released Agent 4, most of the design work happened inside Replit. Why would I make a static mock if I can make something dynamic that we can touch and feel?

Design has always been about prototyping. Apple had this huge demo culture: even for the original iPod, before they wrote any software, Jony Ive made a little prototype you could touch, and Steve Jobs would show up every week and feel how it worked. That was their invention engine. Somehow we landed instead in this world where designers create static images and programmers try to turn those images into software. That's the factory model. With technology, we tried to cast it into the shape of what humans already know, which is manufacturing, the industrial revolution. 

But fundamentally, the AI revolution is different. Now we're finally getting to a place where design and engineering are blurring. We actually have a group at Replit called Design Engineering — people who are good at both — and we combine it with PM as well, so PMs can do all three. The roles inside the organization are blurring. So I agree that design has a bright future, but it's not the same process.

Newton: I asked Claude Design what a complete redesign of Platformer would look like, and made it in my browser in 10 minutes. On one hand, incredible. On the other hand, if I were a designer, I would be so irritated, because it would make me feel like my job was about to change a lot.

Masad: All of us in the economy need to be very adaptable. That painful moment I talked about — admitting that your life's work is obsolete — we all have to go through that. Now, there are fundamental things that will never change. Design thinking is a skill machines are not good at yet. So there are fundamental skills that don't change, but how you apply them will constantly change.

The cool thing about Replit that's different from Claude Design is something we call ambient intelligence. When you click on an artifact you created, we give you options to create variations — so we're actually prompting for you. One of the things that's hard about design is that I don't have the language for it. But I can click through the options until I find something I like, and then ask the agent what it's called, so I can learn that style. You're learning as you're going.

The other thing that's different about Replit is the model choice. If you haven't played with Kimi for design, it's actually really good, because one thing they've done differently: Claude jumps straight to code. Kimi actually reasons about design in the same way it reasons about software engineering. So I think Kimi is actually now a better designer than Claude, and we have it as an option on Replit.

Newton: Let me ask about this post you did on becoming a “self-driving company.” You wrote that in the first six months of this year, the lines of code contributed rose by 5.8x among your engineers. What's the practical effect of that?

Masad: A lot of what we do at Replit is about inventing the future of work — both in our product and in how we operate as a business. I, for one, in many ways, hate work. This new Silicon Valley grindset mentality — 996, whatever — sounds lame as hell. It's like, oh, we want to replicate what the Chinese Communist Party wants to do? No, that's not the future. The future is having fun at work. The most fulfilling times in my life working, I didn't feel it was work. When I invented Replit and the technology it was based on, I didn't work a second. It was just pure invention and creation.

So how do we live that ethos as a company? The idea of a self-driving company is: how do you remove the bureaucracy? How do you make the running of the company happen automatically in the background, so we can all focus on the creative thing? A lot of what you do as CEO is routing. Really, a CEO is a kind of glorified router: this person is working on this, make sure you talk to that person, let me move information from one place to another.

So the first thing is: how do you make information universally accessible? We have a bot internally, and it became sort of like the brain of the company. You can ask any question about the business, the metrics, where the business is headed. We just published another blog post about a self-driving data semantic layer that connects and understands all the different data sources we have. So when you ask that bot a question, it's not going to just one source. It's going to our Notion pages, our Postgres database, our code base, and it can synthesize all that into a report. So you eliminate the hierarchy as a mechanism of information routing. I think you get to a point where the company looks less like a hierarchy and more like a network, like an open-source project of sorts.

Now, when it comes to code, volume of code is not always better, but it depends on the period of time the company is in. AI really is a hits game. Replit Agent invented the coding agent in September 2024, and Claude Code and all these others copied us, and they would tell you that as well. The reason we were able to do that is because we have high velocity as a company. Now we feel like we're in another period. Vibe coding is a thing. Replit as a business is successful — we're one of the fastest-growing companies in the world. But it's not just about continuing to sell the current thing. What comes next? To invent the next thing, you need volume, you need velocity, you need many shots on goal.

Newton: Let's make it concrete. If you're an engineer at Replit shipping three times as much as you used to, what does that mean day to day?

Masad: Feature completeness is definitely important. We don't want to create a suite of products you have to switch between — I'm already confused by ChatGPT, and same thing with Claude. They're reinventing Microsoft Office. Replit should be one product, taking you from idea to design to code to deployment to growth, all in one place.

And then the actual experience of being