Replit’s CEO on building a company that can run itself

Amjad Masad didn't set out to make coding easier just so he could later tell everyone not to bother learning it. But that's roughly where the Replit co-founder has landed. Six years after writing a company blog post about being on the verge of "solving programming," Masad now tells Casey Newton on the Platformer podcast that most engineers, including his own, barely look at code anymore. They review it right before deployment and increasingly let a bot do even that. Replit's business has followed the same trajectory: a $400 million raise in March pushed its valuation to $9 billion, triple what it was six months prior, and the company says it's on pace for $1 billion in annual recurring revenue this year, up from $2.8 million in 2024.

The more interesting story, though, is what's happening inside Replit itself. Masad describes building a "self-driving company" where a CEO functions as, in his words, "a glorified router" whose job is mostly to be automated away. The company has started canceling its own software subscriptions, replacing most analytics vendors with tools employees built in-house using Replit's own agents. He wouldn't name which vendors got cut, saying he felt bad for them, which is either genuine empathy or a nice bit of corporate theater. Either way, Replit claims its engineers nearly tripled output per person over six months without sacrificing code quality, entirely because of internal agent adoption.

That same logic extended to design last month with the launch of Replit Design, an agent-driven creative tool. Masad made a notable claim here: Kimi K3, a model from China's Moonshot AI, is now better at design work than Claude, because it reasons through design decisions the way it reasons through code, rather than jumping straight to output. That's a real jab, given Replit runs largely on Anthropic's models and Masad has spent years praising them publicly.

Masad's honesty about coding education is where things get uncomfortable for him personally. He spent 15 years at Codecademy and then Replit trying to lower the barrier to programming, and now he tells people to skip learning it altogether. He calls this kind of self-honesty a survival requirement for founders, not a betrayal of his life's work, though it clearly still stings a little.

On jobs, Masad doesn't dodge the hard question the way most CEOs do. He expects more companies to exist overall, but smaller ones, with layoffs he calls "100 percent sure." He also calls it cruel to tell a worker in their fifties to simply retrain, and pins that responsibility on governments he thinks aren't grappling with the problem at all. And when asked to grade a prediction that half the software on people's computers will soon be self-made, Masad goes further, arguing that within three years people will use fewer apps altogether as agents transact and operate on their behalf, quietly making the very tool Replit sells feel like a transitional technology.