Y Combinator Startup Podcast
00:10:25 · Paul Graham, Amjad Masad
[00:10:25] S1: Really? [00:10:25] S0: And so it just makes it easier for me. I had the grief of the craft that I love is gone. I've already grieved [00:10:36] S1: You felt that too? Yeah. Okay. So you knew what I was feeling I knew what you were feeling. You showed me that demo. Yes. [00:10:42] S0: But you had to feel it so that you can let go. [00:10:46] S1: I think everybody got convinced at the end of last year, At the end of 2025 is when everybody realized, Okay, AI is going to write all the code. [00:10:55] S0: It's always surprising to me what is the trigger for these kind of things because, again, it seemed obvious to me. [00:11:05] S1: Well, for Replit users, I think they already knew. For Replit users The thing that convinced the rest of the world might have been Claude Code, right? Don't you think? [00:11:13] S0: I think Open Claw. Okay. I think... Claude Code partly, but OpenClaw I think was the first time people experienced this idea of LMs running into completion, where you give it a task and it's able to go all the way until it's [00:11:28] S1: Which you had been doing for a year and a half at that point. [00:11:30] S0: Yes, but I think the form factor of OpenClaw well-being, you could text it and all of that, I think, I sort of underestimate the power of a form factor, especially for everyday people. [00:11:44] S1: Did it influence what you've done with Replit? Did you learn anything from it?
00:11:44 · Paul Graham, Amjad Masad
[00:11:44] S1: Did it influence what you've done with Replit? Did you learn anything from it? [00:11:48] S0: Not yet. I've just learned that lesson. Yeah, I think it will influence things in the future, which is like, I just assume that I go out and like put out a vision and like build a product and everyone will be like, oh, yeah, that's obvious. But I think in reality, think you need to tinker a lot with how people experience it. [00:12:08] S1: Do you still watch users using Replit and sort of see what they're doing and are surprised by it? [00:12:16] S0: Yes. I actually didn't like to do that, but HYA kind of forced me to do it early on. And I would like be kicking and screaming because I would like feel like intense pain when like users are confused by the software or hit a bug or whatever. Yeah. I would be, like, hesitant. Like, I would actually be be, you know, physically [00:12:41] S1: It's it's mortifying It is mortifying. Watch users use your stuff. Yeah. It really is. But you know why it's mortifying? Because till now, you were in denial about the horrors that were being perpetrated daily out there. Right. [00:12:52] S0: And so... But but but our our company culture became a lot about being very close to our users, primarily thanks to Aya, kind of having that that mentality of you just need to constantly talk to them. [00:13:05] S1: She also made you very cool looking. That was one of the really unusual things about Replit early on. Amazing, like, mind bending graphic design. [00:13:15] S0: Right. Yes.
00:13:15 · Amjad Masad, Paul Graham
[00:13:15] S0: Right. Yes. [00:13:16] S1: Right? Like way better than some nerdy program online Mhmm. Kinda company really needs to have. [00:13:21] S0: And it helped a lot with our initial sort of audience, which are like... A lot of them were like teenage hackers. [00:13:26] S1: I thought it was really cool. Mhmm. It made Replit different. Yes. Still have... Replit still... There's something very distinctive about it, you know? Has a very... Replit, like a lot of very successful companies, it has a very strong sort of character of itself, which sounds meaningless, Mhmm. You know? You know what I mean, though? It's like a very sort of a strong solution. It's not a weak... Like in the chemical sense. Yeah. It's not a weak solution. Replit is a strong solution. [00:13:55] S0: Our conceptual understanding of what we build and our product is we always think about engines and hard mechanical things. It is not. [00:14:07] S1: That's a lot of what that graphic design was about, Yes, wasn't [00:14:10] S0: yeah, yeah. It's like there's something that's sort of hardcore about it, but it's also paradoxical in that we slave away so much to make the UX so simple for users, but on the back end, just really ugly engineering is happening. [00:14:27] S1: Systems programming, real systems programming, That's part of your DNA.
00:14:27 · Paul Graham, Amjad Masad
[00:14:27] S1: Systems programming, real systems programming, That's part of your DNA. [00:14:33] S0: That's part of our DNA. It's been always sort of challenging because a lot of programmers will look at Replit and sort of dismiss it because it looks very simple. Yeah. But then even people who end up coming to work at Replit are just like, oh my god, I didn't [00:14:48] S1: know There's so much stuff behind the scenes. Do system administration for people's sins, right? [00:14:55] S0: Yeah, I mean, we do it so they don't have to do it. [00:14:58] S1: Yeah. Yes. Do you think that will be the thing that helps you prevail over competitors? Because that is one difference, the depth of stuff that you've built and the depth of understanding you have of how to deploy programs online. [00:15:12] S0: Yeah, so that is helping us win enterprise in our category because they are a lot more sensitive to reliability, security, all of that stuff. It's really hard to get consumers to care about security, for example. A lot of our competitors do really reckless things with regards to building apps that are unsecure and so on. [00:15:40] S1: Because if you have agents writing all this code, who knows what it's doing? [00:15:42] S0: Yes. Right, yeah. And so we put a lot of guardrails, which makes our products sometimes slower, sometimes more expensive, but enterprises really like that.
00:15:42 · Amjad Masad, Paul Graham
[00:15:42] S0: Yes. Right, yeah. And so we put a lot of guardrails, which makes our products sometimes slower, sometimes more expensive, but enterprises really like that. [00:15:54] S1: And so these newly arrived opportunists who don't have the same sort of depth of infrastructure like Replit's like this iceberg, right, where there's this visible bit above the water that's like, look, you just tell it in English what to do, right? And it writes your code, then underneath, there's all this stuff for deployment in sandbox. Yeah, like we have [00:16:11] S0: kernel operating system engineers. We built our own file system from scratch to be transactional and fully reversible. I remember hearing all these stories. Back in [00:16:24] S1: the days before Vibe coding, that's what all the updates from you would be up about lately. We made our whole new file system. I hope somebody appreciates it. [00:16:31] S0: Yeah. I mean, when wanna make like a coding collaborative, like you had to invent a lot of core primitives that... [00:16:40] S1: So that's an interesting question. Did the stuff that you did in sort of version one of Replit, it's just online programming and you made... And it's sort of collaborative, did the stuff that you did to make it collaborative also help with Vibe coding? [00:16:54] S0: 100%. Mean, it's sort of surreal how plug and play it was. So when you put an agent into a rapport as [00:17:01] S1: we call it It's like you're collaborating with the agent.
00:17:01 · Paul Graham, Amjad Masad
[00:17:01] S1: we call it It's like you're collaborating with the agent. [00:17:03] S0: Yes. The agent is another user. So the initial version was basically the agent was just another user on the same system. [00:17:11] S1: And you had everything else built. [00:17:12] S0: Everything else ready for it. And even even you and the agent could work on the same project and it will just work. [00:17:20] S1: So it's no wonder you discovered Vibe coding first because you were perfectly positioned. You had all the other ingredients. Right? [00:17:27] S0: I mean, this surreal thing, even the way the company was organized was so perfect. So we had the, like, infrastructure team that handles, like, code execution team. Right? This is like sandboxing team, whatever. And then we had the sort of the deployment and cloud services team. This, like, you know, you can, you know, spin up databases and deploy VMs and whatever. And then we had the team that was building the glue between the sort of infrastructure and the IDE, and then we had the IDE team. And so where does AI fit into all of that? So we ended up creating a new agent team and we put it in the middle. And all these people are building now for the agent. So the infrastructure team is exposing tools for the agents. The IDE team, instead of building IDE for humans, now they're building edit tools for the agents. Really? [00:18:22] S1: What sort of IDEs do agents even need? I thought they just generated code. [00:18:26] S0: Well, initially in '24, editing code was actually a hard problem.