Amjad Masad, co-founder and CEO of Replit, discussed his company's efforts to build a self-driving company that can increasingly run itself. This involves using AI agents to automate various tasks, including coding, testing, and deployment. According to Replit, more than 50 million people use its platform, including 85% of the Fortune 500 companies, and it is on track to generate $1 billion in annual recurring revenue by the end of this year. The company recently raised $400 million at a $9 billion valuation after experiencing rapid growth through the adoption of AI-powered coding tools.
Written by the local model on 2026-08-18,
using this article's own text rather than the other coverage of the
same event (that is the story summary below).
Disclosure: my fiancé works at Anthropic, whose models Replit uses and which Masad discusses below.
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Masad → work → which
Last week on the Platformer podcast, Granola's Chris Pedregal told me we are only 5 percent into the AI transformation of work.
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we → tell → 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.
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that → want → itself
Amjad Masad is the co-founder and CEO of Replit, which he started in 2016 with his wife, the designer Haya Odeh.
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he → start → wife
Masad grew up in Amman, Jordan, in a family with Palestinian roots, and sold software for managing local internet cafés while still a teenager.
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Masad → grow → cafés
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.
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He → come → Facebook
Replit started as a website where beginners could run code in a browser without having to install anything.
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beginners → start → 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.
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agent → use → application
This year, the meteoric rise of vibe coding — a term Masad hates — has transformed the company's fortunes.
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Masad → hat → fortunes
In March, Replit raised $400 million at a $9 billion valuation — triple what it was worth six months earlier.
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it → raise → valuation
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.
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it → say → year
(That’s up from $2.8 million in revenue in all of 2024.)
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That → ’ → 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.
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person → publish → 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.
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functions → ’ → router
Replit has begun canceling its own software contracts along the way, replacing most of its analytics vendors with tools its employees built themselves.
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employees → begin → themselves
(He wasn’t quite ready to name names, though, telling me he felt bad for the companies.)
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he → name → companies
Replit, like some of its peers, is also expanding beyond coding tasks.
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Replit → expand → tasks
Last month the company launched Replit Design, an agent-based creative tool.
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company → launch → Design
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."
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that → tell → Claude
Masad admits to having mixed feelings about the way AI is changing work.
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AI → admit → work
After spending 15 years making coding easier to learn, he now tells people not to bother learning it at all.
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he → spend → it
"As an entrepreneur, you have to be honest with yourself," he told me.
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he → have → me
"Otherwise the company would die."
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company → 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.
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I → ask → miniseries
"Net net, there's going to be more jobs, but also there's going to be more companies," he said.
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he → be → ?
"But companies will get smaller, and they will do layoffs — 100 percent sure."
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they → get → layoffs
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.
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he → pair → 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.
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you → ask → computer
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."
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agents → go → behalf
In his telling, the app itself — the thing Replit exists to help you build — is an intermediate step that agents will increasingly skip.
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agents → exist → that
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.
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we → seem → agents
A long excerpt of our conversation is below, edited for clarity and length.
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excerpt → edit → clarity
Listen to the entire conversation wherever you get your podcasts — just search for Platformer — or watch it on YouTube at youtube.com/caseynewton.
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you → listen → youtube.com/caseynewton
And let us know what you think — we welcome your feedback at casey@platformer.news.
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we → let → casey@platformer.news
Replit is one of the biggest names in vibe coding, but I know you don't like the term.
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you → know → term
Why does it grate?
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it → grate → ?
It was never about coding.
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It → cod → coding
It's always about solving problems, about creating things — making software, making apps, making games.
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It → solve → games
The whole mission of Replit was always to make it so that anyone can get access to this technology.
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anyone → make → technology
This technology has always been accessible to 0.5% of the human population, those who could afford a computer science degree.
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who → afford → degree
…and 265 more, not listed.
