After Nine Years of Grinding, Replit Found Its Market. Can It Keep It?
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Replit, a coding platform, has found success after nine years but faces concerns about its long-term viability in a competitive AI-powered coding space.
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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?
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.
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 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.
For example, in the senate passing with 51 votes is a “simple majority”.
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.
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)
Apparently I underestimated vastness.
Oh the things he did to filing cabinets, especially "secure" ones...
The bigger question here is why prod/staging wasn't an obvious design choice in the first place!
Is probably a consumer tech enthusiast and not a software developer.
"When you click a button on our website, a request is sent across the internet to our servers, it's a little like if a sockeye salmon was sent across the internet to our servers."
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.
They were focused on making money back then too. Nobody's complaining that they were trying to make money!
If someone is grateful that the old product existed at the time, because it helped them, it's completely understandable and valid that they'd be sad that it no longer exists to help other people. What there is now has a hundred almost-the-same alternatives[0]; it sounds like what they used to be was unique.
[0] the article quotes a claim about “the first agent-based coding experience in the world” "last fall" but that seems to ignore not-as-successful earlier things like AutoGPT that had code agent projects by early 2024 if not before, with initial "agent" behavior in 2023.
The magic is definitely gone.
It's not as nice as before though. I miss when free accounts could have unlimited projects.
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
They enjoyed it, I enjoyed it, and the teacher UX was great.
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.
[1] https://pitchbook.com/profiles/company/113831-02
So firstly, it would depend if they are doing remote-job/offshoring directly to a dev or if they are contacting a consultancy instead.
A consultancy can seriously bloat the amount of cost but usually non tech are the ones going to a consultancy but in a consultancy very few (like 5%-10%) goes to the actual workers and they are paid from a fresh dev very low amount of money and I would be going on the high end if I said that they paid something like 16k usd for a complete junior and 40k usd would actually put you at a seriously senior level
Though even the 16k can make a very decent living in India.
My brother works at a company (he freelances as well but parents want security so doesn't do it full time) and he earns around 16k usd from the company but 4x the amount of money through freelancing directly
My cousin works at a company and he's working for 4 years now and he could be considered as maybe senior in just a few years and his salary is 30k USD
my brother actually works at one such consultancy and he mentions that most of the companies are actually non-tech which go to consultancies so I am assuming that since replit is a tech company they are doing remote-job
Now I know that my brother has been approached by companies to do full time but its just risky to work in a startup with the current hiring freeze and he manages to do both somehow I would consider that something like 40-60k (60k as an higher end for a great developer), as always things can even reach 70k sometimes but I am talking on a more average basis of sorts.
Off topic but as someone genuinely interested in this craft, (well I am not sure about coding itself, I have coded but I like golang and sys-admin right now, I want to do so much in this software craft and sometimes I am overwhelmed but its so exciting but I genuinely like tinkering/using linux and making software like alternative frontends for some website which blocked me (doubtnut -> doubt.nanotimestamps.org for my own usecase, I code / use LLM's to solve problems I am facing right now or I am curious about and also recently built a custom liveiso for cachy)
Gotta go hand copy some papers oof. Have a nice day!
I can only speak for my brother's company in that sense that if he works there for many years, their chain of ranking would make him a partner in the company (sort of like how layer firms get) and then he would get a flat huge commission on every project he takes and there are some 10 lakhs inr or 12 grand usd as an example and so like it isn't hard to get some really juicy money later down the pipeline.
Though like what I am saying 70k is for like genuinely the most top like 0.0001% or almost never unless for the extremely top official with shit ton of experience like 10-15-20 years
On the other hand, its rather comparatively easy to take a remote job from US and do it from india to get the same 70k which I have seen a hella lot more people do/ is the more practical approach for many.
I don't know but internally speaking 12 grand a year and even 60 grand seems small but its shit boat ton of money but still my mind compared it to the 120k salary guys of the beautiful united states and maybe that's why I overinflated some numbers.
if you have any questions, feel free to ask, I can uh refer to you to my brother if you have any doubts since I am currently in high school.
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.
Edit: looks like they succeeded or the author moved on
It's still up, it only supports IPv6 so that may be why you can't get to it.
[0]: https://files.catbox.moe/oepmri.png
Tells you everything you need to know about the company and its leadership.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27424195
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.
Last push to main was 2 months ago so there's hope: https://github.com/radian-software/riju
”Please note that Riju is only available on IPv6-enabled networks due to the higher financial cost of supporting legacy protocols.”
With Claude, it's like you're handing YOUR laptop's terminal to an intern. With Replit, you can mess things up without consequences, which is a great help for newbies.
> Plus, Replit has another unusual advantage for a startup: a $350 million war chest. Despite raising $100 million in 2023, the company “hadn’t touched” those funds by the time it raised this latest round, Masad told me. The company is capital efficient by design, though Masad joked that as an entrepreneur who grew up watching his refugee father struggle, “one thing I need to learn is to be less frugal and start spending money.”
- reducing headcount by 50% down to ~70 people = firing 70 people
- at a generous estimate of total burdened cost of $1M/person/year, that's $70M/year
- which accounts for a full 5 years of that war chest
- and, moreover, "at its lowest point" suggests that perhaps Replit has expanded headcount again since; the article mentions that it has done some acqui-hires.
Levels.fyi shows Replit salaries in the $200k–300k range, so even at a 2× burden rate, I think that this is probably a significant overestimate of the costs.
Firing 70 people when you have $100 million that you haven't touched, have raised money on top of that, and have many years of runway for the people you fired… comes together to paint a picture that is, imho, less than flattering.
Probably the _best_ advice I got from the entire startup community is, "don't scale without PMF". The saving grace here is that they didn't scale beyond 140 people, so the damage is limited. And they didn't double down on something that would have dropped the whole thing down.
But as a founder, I'd consider it a failure of planning on my part if I had to lay off 50% of my workforce (a failure nobody is immune to, but a failure nonetheless).
If you need that many people to (dis)prove viability.. I don't know. Hard to judge from the outside, though easy to judge in hindsight.
Some people are not in a position in their life to take any risk of losing their job, and that's perfectly understandable, but those people should not take a job at a startup.
Where did he say this?
If the CEO has no idea how to do that they should shut down the company or stand aside and find a better CEO, not try and milk as much money from they can by keeping the company shambling along as long as possible.
The numbers here don't look good.
You have to go find a different business when this happens.
You are welcome to optimize your processes so that you no longer need any employees. But society will still consist of people who need money. And if you don't pass on the surplus you have accumulated in the form of salaries, they will get what they need from you by other means.
HN: It sucks now
neither is reddit
You gotta give it detailed instructions for everything at the start. You can't just build as you go, because every time it adds something it breaks something else.
If it has detailed context of exactly what the entire app will need to do before writing any code, the first tokens will be more likely to build an architecture that works well in a language and framework that is suited for it.
If the initial context is thin on details, it will still pick an architecture, language, and framework but it may not be the best fit for the end goal. After those choices are made that just becomes more context, and it likely would never consider whether the language is now wrong and the entire codebase should be started fresh with a new language or framework.
standard ai workflow
As an online IDE they would have had a chance. But when they pivoted into AI, they decided to enter a highly crowded place with very strong players.
Recently OpenAI and now Anthropic are developing mobile clients as well:
https://www.testingcatalog.com/anthropic-prepares-claude-cod...
https://intuitiveexplanations.com/tech/replit/
Obviously, I love the likes of Tailscale for embracing and supporting this behaviour - but that’s super exceptional (because they’re a strong team).
Serves more as a reminder to the youngsters out there that potential future hirers will use things like this to inform hiring decisions. Legal or not, your history follows you around (I’m old enough to be lucky to not have the stupid stuff I did early in my career available online). Be free, go build stuff for fun but keep clear of your employers space.
Both AI and traditional programming paths share the same initial huge obstacle which is full access to a computer and the internet?
I'm not sure how AI is democratizing programming
I believe he initially had a vision for the product but now the whole schpiel is quotes like "a kid made $180k on an app in 4 weeks" like he was on and on about in podcasts.
Ok if its so easy, why don't you use your own website to do a bunch of $180k / m apps? How many companies can have employees produce 12 different apps per year and a combined revenue of $2.1m per employee? Also everyone can do it so you can pay them minimum wage you don't need developers.
But of course nobody is going to make any successful apps other than the people in the marketing materials.
Well, that’s highly unusual. I recon it is because replit covers the whole production pipeline, from specification to implementation to deployment?