3w ago

Replit CEO on AI breakthroughs: ‘We don’t care about professional coders anymore’

www.semafor.com Replit CEO on AI breakthroughs: ‘We don’t care about professional coders anymore’ | Semafor

Amjad Masad talks about their new AI developments that will allow anyone to code naturally.

Get ready for a bunch of unskilled people making the shittiest apps imaginable.

And I wonder how easy it will be to get Claude to create malware with just a few prompts...

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4w ago

Replit CEO on AI breakthroughs: ‘We don’t care about professional coders anymore’

www.semafor.com /article/01/15/2025/replit-ceo-on-ai-breakthroughs-we-dont-care-about-professional-coders-anymore

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Bit of a rambly story, but I swear it is relevant.
So previously I worked as a consultant for a company that manufactured a relatively small number of high value (tens of thousands of dollars each) Gizmos in a lightly regulated industry - the requirements weren't too crazy, basically that everything has a serial number and they can prove that any given serial passed the full range of tests before it left the factory. Pretty much the sort of thing you'd want to have if you gave a crap about quality products anyway.
Initially they were using Excel to keep track of this - they manufactured 10 units a week, it worked well enough. Eventually, they got more successful and needed to scale up to 50 units a week, and it was decided that they needed A System to keep track of testing and manufacturing. Their head of manufacturing "looked around and couldn't find anything off the shelf that was suitable" (ie, cost $0, and perfectly matched his aesthetic tastes; mistake #1), so they decided to build their own system.
They had a few in house developers, but they were focused on building new features (things that drive sales, unlike maintaining their reputation for delivering reliable products), so head of manufacturing decided to get one of the production line techs (who was "good with computers" by virtue of having built the Excel system, but was not a software developer mistake #2) to do it.
Eventually, they decided to use Microsoft PowerApps to build the new system - for those with the good fortune never to have seen PowerApps, it's essentially a "no code required" drag and drop UI tool that you script using Excel formulas. Think Visual BASIC or Scratch, but Cloudy.
On the surface this made sense - the developer was proficient in Excel, so use what you know. Unfortunately, PowerApps is designed to rapidly build throwaway UIs over simple data models and lacks some of the things that actual software developers would have thought to ask about:
It lacks real version control - you can "undo" a deploy, but there is no way to discover what changed between versions, or do branches, or code review
Because you can't effectively manage changes to the system, you can't do pre-production releases
Its native database system doesn't do referential integrity
There is no straightforward way to do any kind of locking - and because there is no referential integrity, it's really easy for concurrent users to really mess up the data
There is no way to do automated testing
The development group could have actually documented how stuff worked, requirements, specs etc but didn't, so any time there was any issue you had to play the game of "is this a bug or bad design?"
Eventually, these chickens came home to roost in the form of a defect that slipped through testing that they then couldn't isolate to a particular batch because none of their testing data could be trusted. I was brought in to try and unpick this mess and advise on a replacement system, but between the cost to fix the issue and the lost sales from it they ended up in a pretty bad spot financially and ended up being acquired by an investment group.
Anyway, the takeaway from this is that you disregard experience and judgement at your own peril, up front savings generally don't manifest in the long term and I expect there is going to be a thriving market of consultants brought in to point and laugh at companies that decided that a bunch of cheap, inexperienced developers and a magic talking parrot would build better software than cheap, inexperienced developers being guided and upskilled by an experienced senior developer
- This has happened before. GUI tools were going to mean less developers with less cost, but it didn't materialize. Higher level languages were going to cause mass layoffs but it didn't really materialize. Tools like WordPress were going to put web developers out of business, but it didn't really. Sitebuilders like Wix were going to do it, too, but they really haven't.
  These tools perform well at the starter end, but terribly at the larger or enterprise end. Current AI is like that. It can help better than I think people on here give it credit for, but it can't replace. At best, it simply produces things with bugs, or that doesn't quite work. At worst, it appears to work but is riddled with problems.
  I genuinely believe AI isn't over hyped in the long run. We're going to need solutions to fix our current way of work. But I feel confident it's still further away than the people investing in it think it is, and they're going to be paying big for that mistake.
  
  it simply produces things with bugs
  And the small companies will realize that you need to start investing in your QA again - because NO ONE does adequate QA any more. Every piece of software I interact with these days is shit. If you are a developer, I'm talking to you: your code might be great, but the overall product is shit because no one is adequately testing the functionality. I get it, Testing is expensive... but now that you need fewer developers, hire some QA engineers. Just because we've moved on to 'continuous improvement' doesn't mean we can't do better.
- I enjoyed your history. There is a lot to learn about. Thank you.
  
  If you like stories like that, you'll enjoy the DailyWTF. It's littered with cautionary tales like this.
- The last paragraph in this story rings true to me.
  I used to work at a company that wasn’t in the software development or tech industry, but wanted to start working on a new software development project. They were willing to put a bunch of money into patents, registering a new company, etc for this. They were unwilling to hire serious experience and expertise—in other words they exclusively hired interns.
  I kept advocating to bring just 1 experienced developer to help mentor the rest of the team. But they kept ignoring my advice. They continued spending a bunch of money to make the project that was being worked on look amazing to other people. They didn’t do anything to provide an environment to ensure the project was actually good.
  Long story short, I left and from what I can tell the project is not in a healthy state. They have reached the sunk cost fallacy as it has been years since the project was started. There was massive shortsightedness and the person leading the project is one of those “know-it-all” types who doesn’t know jack about software development.
  They focus on short term costs and in the long run it costed them more—and not just financially.
- Maybe a dumb question but isn’t Power App’s “native database” a SharePoint list? Which has integrity protections because it’s a mysql implementation?
- That is something that looks like it could be integrated into ERP system, and they probably already had one sooo seems like a fairly simple problem with a fairly simple solution ( and depending on the size of the company they already might have had either oracle ERP or SAP , unless they were really small ).

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