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Amjad Masad, CEO of AI coding startup Replit, said many companies may be mere months away from being able to develop and operate software without an engineering team.
Speaking at a Semafor Tech event in San Francisco on Wednesday, Masad said startups at Y Combinator are vibe coding their products with tools like Replit. Founders told him that while they thought they would need a chief technology officer, they turned to Replit first to see how much of their product they could code without a software developer. They said, “We’re on month three and haven’t had to hire anyone,” Masad recounted. “We think of Replit as our CTO.”
“I don’t think we’re there yet, where they can run the entire company without hiring engineers, but that might be a year, 18 months away,” Masad said.
The rapid development of AI-powered coding aides have spurred questions about the future of what had been one of Silicon Valley’s most in-demand jobs. Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan said earlier this year that 25% of startups in its winter class generated nearly all of their code with AI tools. At Microsoft’s conference for software developers this week, coders told Semafor they are concerned that tools automating software work could replace a significant number of junior engineers.
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Jill Chase, a partner at Alphabet’s independent growth fund, CapitalG, said the key to funding the next generation of high-growth startups is to trust in the promise of the technology, even if the product itself isn’t stellar yet.
“You have to look at whatever new technology comes out and assume it works,” she said at the Semafor event.
The use of AI in drug discovery is a prime example of trusting where the technology can go, Chase said. While it is difficult today to predict how a new drug candidate will work, that will become easier as AI improves, and will lead to new therapies reaching people at a rapid pace.
“As an investor, you have to live in that space, because otherwise you run the risk of investing in categories that are just not relevant in a longer period of time or applications that are limited by the technology today,” she said.