Y Combinator Startup Podcast
00:02:40 · Amjad Masad, Paul Graham
[00:02:40] S0: And we watched them. [00:02:41] S1: Okay. [00:02:42] S0: How do you do this? And basically, they would copy the code, put it into Replit. Replit would produce some error. They would copy the error, put it into Type T, and then copy the fix, put it in... And it was such a manual process, and I looked at it. [00:02:57] S1: All we have to do is make an API, right? [00:02:59] S0: Well, we have to automate the entire process. It wasn't obvious, it wasn't easy because back then AI models would do a couple of tool calls. Oh, you know what's different? [00:03:10] S1: The difference is it's not just you have to automate the back and forth. You have to understand the errors, right? [00:03:16] S0: Exactly. Yeah, that's hard. Yeah, and you have to loop and the terminal condition should be that the program is working as opposed to... [00:03:24] S1: Yeah, that's still true. [00:03:26] S0: Right, as opposed to kind of we'll do one turn, right? Because that's how ChatGepti sort of worked, that's how most AI tools worked. And so can you [00:03:36] S1: loop indefinitely? Go to completion. Yes. Right? That's the new thing. That's what Claude does. [00:03:42] S0: Yes. So that's what we demonstrated. That's what Replit first demonstrated is... So we demonstrated a couple of things. One is that you can run LLMs to completion. [00:03:54] S1: To- Which I bet was news to the model companies.
00:03:54 · Paul Graham, Amjad Masad
[00:03:54] S1: To- Which I bet was news to the model companies. [00:03:57] S0: They did, they actually reached out to us and they were like, We're so surprised that our explanation works. How did you make it work? And the crazy thing, Paul, is that the harness circuit 24 is 10 times more complex than the harness today because the models were less capable. Yeah. So as models get more capable, the engineering you have to do to make them become agents is less and less so. [00:04:23] S1: Does that mean it's easier for people to compete with you? [00:04:25] S0: Yes. But we have to do... Well, that's the thing about the AI business today is that you have to just accept that everything that you're doing is getting commoditized constantly, You and have to [00:04:38] S1: Be doing the next thing. [00:04:38] S0: Be doing the next thing, right. But the other big thing that we demonstrated is that AI can provision infrastructure. So up until that point [00:04:47] S1: And you actually have infrastructure to provision. Yes. That's the thing that's different between you and all these competitors, [00:04:52] S0: right? Exactly, so we had built databases. [00:04:53] S1: You spent all these years suffering doing system software. Right, right. [00:04:58] S0: Right, it was a little tool call, spin up a database, spin up a Redis, host this. And so what people found so surprising when we launched, I mean, you saw the product July 2024. [00:05:13] S1: And when did you launch it? September 24.
00:05:13 · Paul Graham, Amjad Masad
[00:05:13] S1: And when did you launch it? September 24. [00:05:15] S0: Okay. So when people saw it, like Andrej Karpathy said, this was like an AGI moment, like a field AGI moment because everyone was like, holy crap, like LMs could do that. It freaked me out. [00:05:27] S1: Yeah. I didn't like it at all. [00:05:31] S0: How do you feel about [00:05:32] S1: it right now? Because aesthetically, it was, like, very offensive for you. Yeah. I know. I know. Because the... Either way I program is the exact opposite of this. I like... I program... You know, I spend three years writing a thousand lines of code, and if I can get it down to nine eighty in the next month, so much the better. [00:05:49] S0: But you give me the principle for all of this, which is when you first invest in Replit, when you first back Replit, you said there is a super linear relationship between how easy it is to program and how many programmers you get. [00:06:04] S1: Yes, that's true. That's not just true for programming, that's true for anything consumers use. If you make it 10% easier, you don't just get 10% more people, you get twice as many. Yes. Yeah, remember that. I didn't mean make it this easy. [00:06:17] S0: It went too far. [00:06:18] S1: I mean, just talk in English and it spits out all this code. [00:06:21] S0: Well, so the realization I had is for Replit to be truly successful, we needed to go the whole way.
00:06:21 · Amjad Masad, Paul Graham
[00:06:21] S0: Well, so the realization I had is for Replit to be truly successful, we needed to go the whole way. [00:06:29] S1: Because you did know, you were one of the early people predicting AI, And like, were you predicting, you were essentially predicting vibe coding in something like 2015 or '17 or [00:06:39] S0: Yeah, 2015, 'sixteen, in our original deck, we talk about how if you build a platform where there's millions of people coding, you can train a machine learning model that predicts... [00:06:51] S1: I mean, that's crazy ahead of its time. Yeah. Right? This was before the Transformers paper. [00:06:56] S0: That was before Transformers. [00:06:58] S1: I'm starting to think that's not the visionary, that's just your nuts. [00:07:03] S0: If you're [00:07:03] S1: that early. [00:07:04] S0: Well, think I've been fairly good at predicting where [00:07:09] S1: I'm the just future joking, is you're not [00:07:10] S0: really- Well, even when I was a kid, I remember when I used my first Nokia phone, I was like, Oh my God, people are just gonna be stuck with a new computer. And it was literally like a flip phone essentially. And some of that experience also came to Replit, which is Replit was the first programming platform that had a mobile app. And everyone laughed at us, the idea that Programming on mobile. Programming on your phone. But I [00:07:41] S1: had an RFC for it. Yes. Not an RFC, an RFS. [00:07:45] S0: Well, you [00:07:45] S1: for startups. [00:07:46] S0: You actually... You told me you would fix bugs using the Hacker News Lyspropel from your phone.
00:07:46 · Amjad Masad, Paul Graham
[00:07:46] S0: You actually... You told me you would fix bugs using the Hacker News Lyspropel from your phone. [00:07:54] S1: That's right. Yeah. Not voluntarily. It was just the only way we could get internet access. [00:07:59] S0: But yes, since this podcast is about building the future, I think that people underestimate their ability to potentially predict where the future is headed and build towards it. You just have to think, sit down and think. I don't think many people sit down and think. [00:08:15] S1: No. This is what experts think. Experts think, all I do is I just sit down and think and I have the ideas. Right? You know? And like everybody else tries sitting in that... Sitting down and thinking and they don't [00:08:24] S0: have What's the secret? [00:08:25] S1: It's it's because you've been doing this idea Yeah. For like twenty years. When did you first start thinking about making something like Replit where you could [00:08:34] S0: sort of program online? Well, it's like when I was like... I had my Symbian smartphone and I was in class and I was like, you know, wish I could program. [00:08:44] S1: So how long ago was this? [00:08:45] S0: This was like 2008. Okay, so almost twenty years ago.
00:08:45 · Amjad Masad, Paul Graham
[00:08:45] S0: This was like 2008. Okay, so almost twenty years ago. [00:08:51] S1: This is why when you just sit down and think, you come up with the future, right? Because your whole brain has been thinking about this for twenty years. Right, right? Obsessively. You were trying to build Replit before it was called Replit for years and years and years, right? This has always been the big thing. So of course you thought of stuff before everybody else. So you knew back to that famous demo, right, in the summer of twenty twenty four. [00:09:20] S0: When you called me a Bond villain. [00:09:21] S1: Well, you seem like a Bond villain. That's what I felt like that I was being shown this frightening thing. Because I remember, I still remember what you said. Don't look at that. Don't look at the code. That's object code, right? And I'm like, oh no, the whole stuff that I make, the whole stuff I've spent decades making is just object code. [00:09:42] S0: No, everyone's realizing that. I think, yeah, I've been seeing engineers that were also repulsed by that. I remember your tweet was very controversial when you tweeted that. [00:09:54] S1: That guy who generated vast amounts of code using AI, yeah. [00:09:57] S0: Well, even that tweet about me being the one villain and object code and all of that was also controversial, but now all engineers are... I think with AI, everyone will have to go through this period of denial and then sort of later on depression and then eventually acceptance. Yeah. I've had it in 2020. [00:10:25] S1: Really?