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I know this isn't very on the topic, but these articles make me cringe physically.
> “You should compete,” I suggested.
> He smirked. “I always compete.”
Feels like a vocal jerk-off. Just tell me the details, idc how tuff the interview was.
This is a style of writing called "narrative journalism" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narrative_journalism
I find it pretty distracting too.
These pieces are usually just advertising with more words. They want to frame Replit and their hero founder as being rebels who don't follow the rules or fear goliath.
This is fantasy fiction for VCs, founders, AI bros, and anyone else who isn't actually looking for information.
replit is actually quite popular among teenagers and basically third world youngsters trying to spin off a service or a "product" of their own.
- i mean yes u cannot make money out of teenagers but damn replit's Vibe coding tool is fucking good. Better than Lovable or Bolt any day.
just to give u a perspective from a 20year old kid from a 3rd world county
I think this is exactly it. Replit is a cheap and easy way to get an MVP off the ground ASAP. However, their audience is inherently hackathon attendees, not real businesses. Whether these can turn into real businesses (en masse to justify low churn and consistent SaaS ARR) or not is the real question.
thanks for sharing, that's an interesting perspective actually. It's easy for us "pro devs" to kind of ignore platforms like Replit as "training wheels." I look at it and think "why would I use that, I have all my own stuff set up the way I like it locally".
But us older guys (i'm not that old, 34, but still) can easily forget how valuable and exciting it is to have tools that make the publication / deploy easy. It's cool to hear what the younger, less experienced crowd gravitates towards in the modern dev tool landscape. Thanks for sharing!
Why don't you just use Claude?
I don't get all these vibe coding tools when Claude is better than any of them
If your optimizing for simple, powerful, and on mobile then Replit is hard to beat.
which country are you from?
Know Amjad from years ago. We're on the opposite sides of ideological barricades, but he's no terrorist sympathizer. Just a man who loves his people. He seemed extremely pragmatic too-- if he ran Gaza it'd be an economic paradise by now.
He doesn't seem pragmatic because everything I read about him or any time I hear from him it's about this geopolitical issue. Doesn't he have a company to run? What's the point of making this front and center part of your personality. His thoughts on the war in Gaza is literally the only thing I know about him. That and him firing an intern about a weekend project. It's all just exhausting.
How is that pragmatic? If you want to do good things, build a business and donate money or whatever. Getting into Twitter wars with internet strangers and spending on PR to tell everyone what you think about geopolitics strikes me as anything but pragmatic.
So success buys you ideological latitude
It's fascinating to read how Hacker News helped make Replit successful. I hope everyone will try this tool! I wonder if Masad still scrolls here nowadays.
I absolutely love the idea of Replit and I think it's an awesome platform and idea.
I do wonder how sustainable it is as a business though. I expect Replit is sending the majority of that money to the big AI labs through API costs
As soon as anything becomes serious you're going to try and take it off Replit and use something like Claude Code and AWS etc
I remember learning to code with replit, the people from the course recommended replit because there was no setup to do
So I got excited and used Replit because I heard about it in a Diary of a Ceo podcast. Spent days working on my project, it was working in their unique tech stack and when I did local git commits it locked some files and conflicted with their replit agent also doing git operations and got stuck in a loop where the fix was to do a git reset --hard and reset the state.
Unfortunately their tooling locks me out from doing that and I wouldn't get help from their team after asking twice and getting moved to several different support members of their team. They just ghosted me and so I left and took my business elsewhere. Doesn't seem like it was made for advanced users.
Unfortunate.
exe.dev is already miles better already than what replit is attempting to do with it's AI things
Replit with vercel starter templates and supabase is amazing. I even have it do all my migrations and RLS policies. Also playwright automated testing in github action CI/CD.
I have it originated from a master prompt project I have architected with shadcn suggestions and how I like my app router setup.
I'm hooking this up to comet to be fully agentic with Linear tasks and human-in-the-loop approvals with up to 5 UI versions per feature. And ts contract request/responses for my nextJS api endpoints.
I also host a "LangChain" similar like tool in Azure C# minimal API in a shared replit secret. It's so nice to be able to re-use secrets for Radar, etc across all my apps.
The title is a non-sequitur.
“Terrorist sympathizer” and “successful businessperson” (or “rich person”) are completely orthogonal. Building a successful business does not necessarily change your terrorist sympathisation status. You can be a rich terrorist sympathiser.
Nothing like paying someone to shill for you.
well, it's not a high bar – these days anyone who says "I support Palestine Action" or "she was murdered by ICE" is called a terrorist sympathizer
> Masad, 38, has felt obliged to speak out about Gaza ever since, calling out those in tech who, in his view, have supported Israel’s “genocide” of the Palestinian people.
This sentence would be better without the scare quotes. Something like "calling out those in tech who support what he views as a genocide."
interesting hearing his justification for working w Saudi but not Israel:
He says he would never work with Israel now. “I think it’s an illegitimate and criminal government,” he told me during our gun safety training. “I mean, [Benjamin] Netanyahu is a war criminal.”
When I pointed out that Saudi Arabia has its own abysmal human rights record, Masad drew a contrast.
“I just think about how Replit is going to be used. Like, Israel is actively committing genocide and ethnic cleansing, and if you sell to the government there, it’s possible that they’re going to use it for that,” he said, pointing to the country’s use of Microsoft cloud services to track Palestinians’ phone calls. (After an investigation by The Guardian, Microsoft said it disabled the services that made the tracking possible in September."
Reading through this piece and all I can think of is how he's just the other side of the same coin. Simply a different color of the same elitism that our world is moving into as money concentrates and starts to meddle more and more with our political spheres while accountability slowly errodes to zero.
It's ridiculous to frame an opinion that's extremely common and popular as some kind of expression of rebellion against "the man". What a puff-piece.
Replit seems to be another company that doesn't justify it's valuation in this bubble
Public opinion on Amjad shifted quite a bit in 2021 when he threatened to sue a former intern for his open-source project.
All these things are so amusing. Amjad Masad dislikes Israel and is fine with Saudi Arabia. Palmer Luckey will spend his life doing rainman calculations on the angle of the car in Minneapolis. One is a “terrorist”, other is a “fascist”.
But you can tell it’s all motivated reasoning. Standing with your tribe. It’s not much of a matter of honour. It’s just flashing your banners.
In the end, they are wealthy, but they are just people. And they have all these things and why do I really care what Ja Rule has to say about the new cyclone.
I'm not a fan of a guy who builds a brand around politics. It will come around.
Of all the tools I try and review, replit remains to be simply the worst in my opinion. I struggle to do anything useful with it except trivial hello world type of stuff. The bubble is real.
Are we still doing these kinds of lionizing puff pieces after SBF, Holmes, Musk and all the others? By now, I consider being featured in one a negative signal.
You can be a controversial figure politically and still build a generation defining product. The market rewards utility, not ideological purity.
The headline frames this as a paradox, as if these two things are incompatible. But they aren't mutually exclusive, he can be both.
This guy isn't a mold-breaking radical, he's just a garden variety sociopath https://intuitiveexplanations.com/tech/replit/
"was called" - who was behind that?
"one being so good that anyone can become a software engineer".
Of course, smartphones' cameras are so good and accessible, but not anyone who became a professional photographer?
And of course, isn't software engineering far beyond than simply writing code in any form - whether in English or in symbols?
“Masad insists he speaks up even when it hurts his business. In that regard, ‘I’m probably the only contrarian in Silicon Valley.’”
GPT wrapper.
> Palestinian man is ok working with the Saudis
At least it isn't the UAE but... really? Still happy for him though.
What kind of dumbass title is this? 99.99% of the world is not afraid of silicon valley.
What an interesting tile. Is the value of his AI company expected to overcome the 'terrorist sympathizer' allegation? Is this how it works always or just when the person is inside the present Overton Window?
Let's try Elon Musk then: "He was called a 'fascist'. Now, his tech company is valued $1.5T"
This is the way, right?
A reminder that antizionism is not antisemitism