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

Amjad Masad: 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.

Amjad Masad: I'll make a prediction that maybe will sound even detrimental to Replit's business. I think that a lot of software will not be used by humans; it will be used by agents. Right now, you have a problem, you make an app, you use that app to solve the problem. So there are intermediate steps. Why don't we have a problem, you articulate the problem, the problem gets solved? That's fundamentally what agents do. Increasingly, the way I use Replit, I make apps, but oftentimes I just tell it to do the thing. I'm sure a lot of Claude users and ChatGPT users and Codex users are doing that, where instead of creating the intermediate app, the agent just does it. The way we're building the Replit agent is that it has this concept of learning. It will store memories. It will create skills for itself — skills that have software, API calls, scripts it could use. So in three years, I think we'll be using fewer apps. And yes, the apps that you do use, a lot of them will be self-made, perhaps 50%. But we're going through this explosion of apps, and actually that will decline. And then agents' computer use is going to get really good over the next two to three months. Agents will be better at using your browser than you are, so you'll be able to text them on iMessage or ChatGPT or whatever, and it will be using software on your desktop on your behalf. You'll be able to create loops — something Replit is interested in building as well — that can use and write software to solve problems. So we go from prompting to expressing intent: I want to solve this larger problem, and the agent will figure out what it needs to do. So, concrete prediction. 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.

Amjad Masad: 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.