In three years, we'll be using fewer apps and more agents, and those agents will be using the apps on our behalf — the app itself is an intermediate step that agents will increasingly skip.

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.

Read full article ↗excerpt · fair-use quotation