The Scoop
A Silicon Valley AI coding startup is launching a new tool that it hopes will change the way companies develop software.
Replit, valued at over $1 billion and backed by venture firms like Andreessen Horowitz and Khosla Ventures, says its new product, called Replit Teams, will allow developers to collaborate in real-time on software projects while an AI agent automatically fixes coding errors.
The concept, which the company planned to announce Tuesday at its annual Developer Day in San Francisco, is similar to Google Docs but for coding. And it works as if one of the people working on it is an editor who is fixing typos and suggesting new wording as the document is created.
Ultimately, humans will remain in the drivers’ seat, but Replit says it will allow the software development process to go faster and more smoothly.
“Our agents will require no prompting. They’ll just jump in and present a fix,” said Replit founder and CEO Amjad Masad, in an exclusive interview with Semafor.
Masad said the ultimate goal is to keep developing more AI agents that specialize in various aspects of software development. To users, it will appear as if the same agent is getting more capable over time.
Replit says its agent is built on a proprietary AI model that specializes in software development and outperforms GPT-4 in coding benchmarks but is a fraction of the size — 7 billion parameters compared to more than 1 trillion.
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Software development was among the first commercial use cases for frontier models like OpenAI’s GPT family of offerings.
Microsoft-owned GitHub first incorporated OpenAI models, offering a code completion tool called Copilot in 2021.
Now, a new batch of startups is attempting to take code completion to the next level. Startup Cognition says it is developing a tool called “Devin,” which can act as an autonomous software developer, creating entire projects from scratch. Another high profile, venture-backed company called Magic is “building a coworker, not just a copilot,” according to its web site.
But those startups have yet to launch a publicly available commercial product. Replit, founded in 2016, says it has an advantage over competitors because it has valuable data. Developers can use Replit to create, test and deploy software, giving it visibility into the whole process.
Replit also offers a “bounty” service, where individuals and companies can ask developers on its platform to make them software. That data could be particularly valuable because the bounties almost mimic AI prompts. Eventually, Replit models might be able to complete a first draft of a software project from a prompt.
With its new Teams product, companies will be able to move even more of the software development process within the Replit ecosystem.
“We’re getting a lot of adoption at big companies - they’re asking us for this,” Masad said.
Reed’s view
When Replit launched its Ghostwriter Chat (we broke that story just over a year ago), the company planted its flag as a competitor to Microsoft’s Github.
A couple of months later, it raised nearly $100 million, putting its valuation north of $1 billion.
Back then, Replit was gunning for GitHub. Now, the landscape has gotten even more crowded. That is validation that Replit is on the right track. It will also serve as a major motivator to move even faster.
GitHub, which has flirted with the idea of a similar collaboration tool for years, is still the massive incumbent and can use its smaller competitor as inspiration for new ideas. And nimble startups can attempt to pick off various parts of the software development process.
As the race for AI-enabled software development has heated up over the past year, Masad’s stature as a Silicon Valley leader has only grown.
The next year or two will put his abilities to the test. If you had to make a tournament bracket of AI startups, Replit would be high up among the favorites, but it’s going to be a competitive march to the finish.
