Replit’s CEO says the future of work is the ‘self-driving company’
TechCrunch Sarah Perez
Replit’s CEO says AI agents are taking over the grunt work inside companies. He thinks people won’t disappear, but their job will shift to judgment, taste, and deciding what matters.
Based on reporting by TechCrunch, Sarah Perez — read the original for the full story.
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Replit CEO and co-founder Amjad Masad says the company’s own use of AI has turned into a preview of how work may change more broadly. Speaking at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco on Thursday, he argued that AI agents are already doing more of the busywork while people move toward higher-level decisions.
His phrase for it is a “self-driving company.” Not robots. Not some grand automation fantasy. The idea is simpler: agents handle the repetitive parts, and humans stay in the loop for judgment calls. Masad said Replit’s own team started thinking this way after AI agents became more reliable earlier this year.
He gave support requests as the clearest example. At Replit, an agent looks first at the GitHub issues, the codebase, and Linear tickets, then hands a fuller picture to a person. If that person decides a fix should go out, another agent can be deployed with a click. The loop runs with agents doing most of the work, but Masad was blunt that the middle still depends on people who have judgment and taste.
That shift, in his view, is changing what employees spend their time on rather than simply cutting them out. He said Replit is spending more time on what to work on, architecture, and broader discussions. And when the company talks to other businesses, the pitch is less about replacement than productivity and making work more creative — and, he said, less boring.
Masad’s bigger point was that the AI story Silicon Valley keeps telling is too narrow. The useful version, he said, is a workplace that feels more self-improving, with humans steering and agents hauling the load.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
This is the less flashy AI pitch, which is exactly why it sounds more real. The industry keeps trying to sell apocalypse or magic, when the obvious change is that people get promoted from clicking through sludge to deciding what the sludge means. That’s not a utopia, but it’s a lot better than pretending software will run the company and the coffee machine will do product strategy.
Read more about this at: TechCrunch
