The Replit AI team has trained several agents. While the developer world was obsessed with Cursors and Claude, Replit Agent took the lead and eliminated the need for even AI to write code.
“AI is incredibly capable of writing code. But that’s not enough to write software. You can set up a development environment, install packages, configure a DB, and if you’re lucky… and deploy it,” said Amjadmasad, announcing the launch of Replit Agent, which automates all of these processes, into early access.
Replit Agent is an AI tool that allows users to build software projects by interpreting natural language prompts. It simplifies software development and makes it more accessible to users of different skill levels. Currently, the agent is only available for Repls created via Replit Agent entries and does not support existing Repls or imported repositories.
But apart from that, everyone is impressed. Even Andrej Karpathy, who is actively building with Cursor, says that Replit Agent falls into the “AGI-feeling” category.
“As I mentioned in the post, creating an actual app involves more than just code; you have to set up and deploy an entire environment. By automating all the other infrastructure, anyone can quickly build an entire web app. and be able to deploy it,” Karpathy said.
What can agents do?
Cursor could replace or at least downsize software engineering teams, Claude Artifacts said it could kill app stores, and Replit Agent connects to databases from landing pages. You can build most things, even healthcare apps, within seconds. This doesn’t require you to write a single line of code.
Massad shares examples of how he built a healthcare app in minutes that allowed agents to fix bugs themselves, built a live Flask and Vanilla Javascript-based website using postgres in under 10 minutes, and even Wordle Clone. I showed you an example that I built in just 2 minutes and 43 seconds.
Zapier’s Andrew Davison was the first to use Replit Agent to build a fully working browser-based Pong game in less than 90 seconds. “I didn’t have to do any coding myself. I just sat and watched,” he said.
Just used @Replit's new AI Agent to create a fully working browser-based pong game in less than 90 seconds 👀
I had to do zero coding myself. Just sat back and watched.
Where was this tech back when I was bored in school IT classes 😅
(tutorial coming to @BensBitesDaily soon) pic.twitter.com/3kdZMCwzrD
— Andrew Davison (@AndrewJDavison) September 5, 2024
The most important use case for Replit Agent is when building an MVP for a product within your organization. Without this, it will take a lot of time. “AI makes coding fun again by eliminating the need for annoying boilerplate and API glue,” said Scott Kennedy, VP of Engineering at Replit. It saves a day of work.”
Replit’s move is very timely given the conversation around the release of Devin and other agents coming to market such as Cody.AI and ReactAgent. The only problem I currently have is the lack of a Python backend.
Everyone’s agent?
The most interesting thing about Replit’s approach is that the AI coding agent that Replit has always been famous for is also available on smartphones. It has always been Replit’s goal to make AI available to everyone through our proactive approach to open source. RedBull’s Sander Saar said he was able to build three functional web apps in less than four minutes on his mobile phone.
“Replit Agent doesn’t just review and write code; the AI agent plans features, creates development environments, installs dependencies, writes code, configures databases, and deploys.”Saar he explained, wondering if this was the end of paying for the software.
The fear of being replaced remains strong among software engineers, and it grows with each new AI release. “For someone learning how to code, do you think it still makes sense to understand all the low-level details, or do you think it’s better to learn how to talk to agents?” is a development asked in a post on Karpathy.
The truth is that using AI tools can help you learn how to code. The future of coding from “tab tab tab” is now slowly moving into a single prompt, which can be scary for software engineers. But before all the coding work is unnecessary, it is also essential to learn how the code works.
One thing is for sure: software engineering teams will definitely shrink in size in the future as companies will be able to create prototypes and more in a matter of seconds. This is especially worrying for IT companies and developers in India, which may soon find itself in a state of emergency.
Many people, including students in India and other parts of the world, cannot afford to pay for services like Cursor or GitHub Copilot. It usually costs $10 a month or something like that. Access to AI-driven workflows is essential as these skills will be expected by future employers and when starting your own business.
Russel Kaplan, president of Cognition Labs, predicted that software engineering would be about managing teams of AI agents, and it looks like it’s coming true. AI developers say coding is just one part of software engineering, so thanks to Replit, their dream of delegating that task to an AI agent is finally a reality.
