After nine years of grinding, Replit found its market. Can it keep it?
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Re: After nine years of grinding, Replit found its market. Can it keep it?
#2>Rather than becoming defensive, Masad and his team owned the problem. In fact, says Masad, within two days, they rolled out an automatic safety system that separates a user’s “practice” database from their “real” one. The way Masad describes it, it’s a little like having two versions of a website’s filing cabinet — the AI agent can experiment freely in a development database, but the production database, which is the real thing that users interact with, is completely walled off.
I gotta wonder who the median techcrunch reader is if the writer/editor felt it necessary to explain the point of having a staging and prod environment, and with such a pointless analogy. We surely cannot understand what a database is unless we're told it's like a filing cabinet, right?
Re: After nine years of grinding, Replit found its market. Can it keep it?
#3personally, the evolution of replit makes me sad. i remember writing some of my very first ever programs in python using replit in middle school, as it wasn't blocked by the school network and it was the best way of running arbitrary code online back then. i used it to execute java code for AP computer science in high school, and i improved a ton at using the terminal as well. At some point, I stopped using the replit web editor and was coding by full-screening the built-in terminal and using vim. it was a formative experience and really helped me develop as a programmer even though all i had access to was a locked-down chromebook. but now, going back to the website and seeing the first thing it shows to you is how you can "build apps using AI", not even being able to even create an environment to run some python code without talking to an LLM, and the company focusing on ARR and becoming "AI-native" and creating value and all that jazz, and it feels like the magic of learning to code for the first time has been lost. luckily, kids these days are spoiled with webassembly and can run pretty much whatever they want in the browser, so i'm sure the next generation of young programmers will be alright
Re: After nine years of grinding, Replit found its market. Can it keep it?
#4>Rather than becoming defensive, Masad and his team owned the problem. In fact, says Masad, within two days, they rolled out an automatic safety system that separates a user’s “practice” database from their “real” one. The way Masad describes it, it’s a little like having two versions of a website’s filing cabinet — the AI agent can experiment freely in a development database, but the production database, which is th…
You don't write for your median reader, you write for the vast majority of your readers.
That's a basic concept of writing. Journalism should be accessible, so even if you know what a database is and how to deploy it in different envs, you shouldn't write assuming that. If a large portion of your readers don't know what you're saying, you've failed as a writer. If your readership includes high school students, you write with that as the baseline.
Richard Feynman certainly didn't write as if he assumed the reader knew particle physics. Be like Richard Feynman.
Re: After nine years of grinding, Replit found its market. Can it keep it?
#5>Rather than becoming defensive, Masad and his team owned the problem. In fact, says Masad, within two days, they rolled out an automatic safety system that separates a user’s “practice” database from their “real” one. The way Masad describes it, it’s a little like having two versions of a website’s filing cabinet — the AI agent can experiment freely in a development database, but the production database, which is th…
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Re: After nine years of grinding, Replit found its market. Can it keep it?
#6I've used Replit for educational materials when teaching beginners Python and JavaScript. They had a nice product called Teams for Education. It was even announced that it'll become fully free (the original blog post with the announcement was deleted from their website) [0], but soon after that the company had pivoted to AI and later discontinued the Teams for Education completely [1].
I also used Replit's embedded widgets for occasional lessons, but they kept changing the UI and behavior, making it difficult to write consistent reliable documentation for beginners.
I think by now it's clear that the product is not meant for educators, like it was originally, so that's ok.
[0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20240924020257/https://blog.repl...
Re: After nine years of grinding, Replit found its market. Can it keep it?
#7>Rather than becoming defensive, Masad and his team owned the problem. In fact, says Masad, within two days, they rolled out an automatic safety system that separates a user’s “practice” database from their “real” one. The way Masad describes it, it’s a little like having two versions of a website’s filing cabinet — the AI agent can experiment freely in a development database, but the production database, which is th…
You don't write for your median reader, you write for the vast majority of your readers. That's a basic concept of writing. Journalism should be accessible, so even if you know what a database is and how to deploy it in different envs, you shouldn't write assuming that. If a large portion of your readers don't know what you're saying, you've failed as a writer. If your readership includes high school students, you wr…
Richard Feynman didn’t use poor analogies.
Re: After nine years of grinding, Replit found its market. Can it keep it?
#8Earlier quoted context omitted.
You don't write for your median reader, you write for the vast majority of your readers. That's a basic concept of writing. Journalism should be accessible, so even if you know what a database is and how to deploy it in different envs, you shouldn't write assuming that. If a large portion of your readers don't know what you're saying, you've failed as a writer. If your readership includes high school students, you wr…
Richard Feynman didn’t use poor analogies.
'Poor' is subjective. Some might even use it to describe your comment.
Re: After nine years of grinding, Replit found its market. Can it keep it?
#9>Rather than becoming defensive, Masad and his team owned the problem. In fact, says Masad, within two days, they rolled out an automatic safety system that separates a user’s “practice” database from their “real” one. The way Masad describes it, it’s a little like having two versions of a website’s filing cabinet — the AI agent can experiment freely in a development database, but the production database, which is th…
Ironically, especially when you combine it with the em-dash, it really sounds like exactly the type of completely pointless and unilluminating analogy that LLMs love to generate. These analogies are essentially a bridge between two concepts, much like how a physical bridge connects two pieces of land separated by water, except in this case the 'water' is understanding and the bridge doesn't actually help you cross it.
Re: After nine years of grinding, Replit found its market. Can it keep it?
#10>Rather than becoming defensive, Masad and his team owned the problem. In fact, says Masad, within two days, they rolled out an automatic safety system that separates a user’s “practice” database from their “real” one. The way Masad describes it, it’s a little like having two versions of a website’s filing cabinet — the AI agent can experiment freely in a development database, but the production database, which is th…
To be fair, this was an indirect quote from a founder trying to make programming accessible to "white-collar employees with no technical background".
The bigger question here is why prod/staging wasn't an obvious design choice in the first place!