The Scoop
Replit, the AI-powered software creation platform, has formed a strategic partnership with Microsoft, offering businesses a new product to dabble in the “vibe coding” craze that has upended the tech industry.
The deal gives Replit, a startup founded in 2016, a new conduit to Microsoft’s vast customer base, while the software giant can enable enterprise customers to build and deploy applications using natural language.
Microsoft pioneered AI-powered coding with its GitHub Copilot, which started out as a simple autocomplete feature. Replit and other startups are taking AI coding to its logical destination: The ability to create entire apps from simple written descriptions.
Replit users can create a web application in minutes by describing what they want to build. Amjad Masad, the company’s CEO, said some companies are using Replit to create simple, customized software at a fraction of what it would cost to build in-house or pay for via SaaS subscriptions.
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Step Back
One of the biggest hurdles for companies that want to enable AI-driven “vibe coding” is that amateur coders aren’t as familiar with the intricacies of deploying software and can introduce security vulnerabilities and other issues.
With its new partnership, Microsoft says Replit apps that are purchased through the Azure marketplace come with guardrails meant to mitigate problems inherent to amateur coding.
Reed’s view
It was almost two years ago that I wrote about the “rise of the novice coder,” focusing on Microsoft’s “low-code” solutions for development. The deal with Replit is symbolic of an insatiable shift to purely language-based processes for software development.
This still isn’t perfect, but as AI models improve, the software that these amateur developers create will become increasingly complex and robust. Replit, for instance, ditched its home-grown AI models for Anthropic’s Claude model, and made a big leap in coding ability.
And Microsoft’s deal with Replit, which is a Trojan Horse for more Anthropic AI models, shows the growing separation between Microsoft and OpenAI.
Room for Disagreement
We could still be a long way from natural language coding. According to some research, highlighted in Devops.com, one coding benchmark shows Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet completed “only 26.2% of individual engineering tasks and 44.9% of management tasks.” Even then, most of its solutions are incorrect, according to the report.
Notable
- Vibe coding is also sweeping the upper echelons of the startup ecosystem, where, until recently, software talent was the scarcest and most coveted resource, Semafor’s Rachyl Jones wrote last month.
- A bootstrapped, six-month-old vibe coding startup, built almost entirely by one developer, recently sold to Wix for $80 million, signaling the head-spinning growth of the sector, TechCrunch reported.