Replit Blog
Aug 15, 2023New Workspace Features to Keep Your API Keys Safe
As the community using Replit continues to grow, we want to help all users follow best practices and store API keys and secrets securely, rather than directly in code. Our Secrets feature, available in every Repl, allows you to store API keys securely where other users running or forking your Repl can’t access them. Now, we’re introducing new Workspace features to proactively help you protect your API keys and secrets. When Replit detects that you’re attempting to paste a likely secret value, like an API key or token, into a file, our Secret Scanner will warn you and give you the option to store that value as a Secret instead. The scanner runs behind the scenes and is completely client-side. You won’t know it’s there unless a potential secret value is encountered. How it works The Secret Scanner uses a list of known API key patterns and regexes to identify a likely secret value and warn you. Within the Secrets feature, data is encrypted with AES-256 at rest, and encryption keys are stored in a secure location that is protected by multiple layers of security. To help protect against key compromise, encryption keys are rotated regularly. Only you and your invited collaborators can see Secret values in a Repl.
Jul 13, 2023State of AI Development: 34x growth in AI projects, OpenAI's dominance, the rise of open-source, and more
With the introduction of Large Language Models (LLMs), for the first time, Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) became accessible to everyday developers. Apps that feel magical, even software that was practically impossible to build by big technology companies with billions in R&D spend, suddenly became not only possibly, but a joy to build and share. The surge in building with AI started in 2021, grew rapidly in 2022, and exploded in the first half of 2023. The speed of development has increased with more LLM providers (e.g., Google, OpenAI, Cohere, Anthropic) and developer tools (e.g., ChromaDB, LangChain). In parallel, natural language interfaces to generate code have made building accessible to more people than ever. Throughout this boom Replit has grown to become the central platform for AI development. Tools like ChatGPT can generate code, but creators still need infrastructure to run it. On Replit, you can create a development environment (Repl) in seconds in any language or framework which comes with an active Linux container on Google Cloud, an editor complete with the necessary tools to start building, including a customizable Workspace, extensions, and Ghostwriter: an AI pair programmer that has project context and can actively help developers debug. Deployments allowed developers to ship their apps in secure and scalable cloud environments. Given our central role in the AI wave, we wanted to share some stats with the community on the state of AI development. Building with AI Since Q4 of 2022, we have seen an explosion in AI projects. At the end of Q2 ‘23, there were almost 300,000 distinct projects that were AI related. By contrast, a search of GitHub shows only ~33k OpenAI repositories over the same time period.
Jun 29, 2023Empowering Educators with MagicSchool and Replit Deployments
Replit is where builders come to bring their software and app ideas to life, fast. We’re showcasing builders and the software they created and deployed on Replit. If you interested in being showcased, click the button below.
- Jun 24, 2023
Internship Experience At Replit
Hey! I'm Nathan. It's been a short but exciting few months at Replit, and I wanted to share my experience with you all. The Journey Begins I started programming back in 2018. Since then, I’ve met fantastic people, learned new stuff, and made a lot of wacky projects. What I did not expect was a technical recruiter to reach out to me through Twitter.
- Jun 9, 2023
Keeping Your API Keys Safe
Replit gives you the power to both build your own applications and to leverage powerful third party services through their APIs. By integrating third party services into their Repls, Replit users have unlocked a diverse range of capabilities such as speech to text, video livestreaming, embedding data into AI applications, and even tracking Amtrak trains. Integrating a third-party service into your Repl usually involves acquiring an API key or token from the third party that uniquely identifies you and your app. It’s important to keep this API key secret because if it is leaked and used by someone else, they could misuse it while impersonating you. You could find yourself losing your API access, or even incurring unauthorized charges. We saw this need and developed tooling around it for you. Replit makes it easy for you to protect your API keys, by using Secrets. When you add your API key as a Secret, you make sure that it won’t be visible to others who view your Repl’s code, and won’t be included if anyone else forks your Repl. With the recent explosion of interest in AI, there has been a corresponding rise in the theft of OpenAI API keys in particular. Replit is doing its part to make sure that our users don’t become victims of this crime. We have been a partner of OpenAI’s since 2021 and care deeply about AI development and security.
Jun 6, 2023Revolutionizing Language Learning with Replit Deployments
Replit is where builders come to bring their software and app ideas to life, fast. We’re showcasing builders and the software they created and deployed on Replit.
Jun 5, 2023Replit AI Manifesto
Amjad Masad, CEO: I'm excited to welcome Michele Catasta to the Replit team as our VP of AI. Michele joins us from Google, where he was Head of Applied Research at Google Labs and, before that, Google X, where he researched Large Language Models applied to code. Michele has a Ph.D. in Computer Science and was Research Scientist and Instructor in AI at Stanford University. This manifesto is a culmination of a conversation Michele and I have had for over a year on the future of AI and its impact on the software industry: “People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware.” [1982] More than 40 years later, Alan Kay’s quote still sounds as relevant as it gets – no wonder he is recognized as one of the most influential pioneers of our industry. As a matter of fact, over the past few decades software and hardware worked in conjunction to dramatically augment human intelligence. Steve Jobs celebrated Alan’s quote in his famous 2007 keynote, right after launching the very first iPhone – possibly one of Steve’s mottos, considering how Apple built its reputation and massive success story on unprecedented software/hardware integration. At Replit, our mission is to empower the next billion software creators. Our users build software collaboratively with the power of AI, on any device, without spending a second on setup. We accomplished that by creating from the ground up a delightful developer experience. The Replit development environment allows our users to focus solely on writing software, while most of the hardware (and Cloud computing) complexities are carefully hidden away.
May 31, 2023Replit Builders Series - NodePad: From Idea to MVP with Replit Deployments
Replit is where builders come to bring their software and app ideas to life, fast. We’re showcasing builders and software they created and deployed on Replit. NodePad is a platform for idea exploration driven by AI. NodePad founder Saleh Kayyali went from designer to consumer app founder. The app he built and deployed end to end on Replit has thousands of users and slick UI. It shot to #5 on HackerNews, and yet he’s never been paid to develop software before. How?
- May 19, 2023
May 18 Replit downtime
Yesterday, we had a period of about 2h from 11:45 to 13:56 (Pacific Time) in which all users were unable to access their Repls through the site. We have addressed the root cause, and the system is now operating normally. We know a two-hour downtime is not acceptable for you or your users. This post summarizes what happened and what we're doing to improve Replit so that this does not happen again. Technical details Here is the timeline of what happened, all times in Pacific Time: In 2021, we changed the way that configuration is pushed to the VMs that run Repls and streamlined multiple kinds of configurations. During this migration, a latent bug that we had not hit was introduced. When we tried to see if a configuration kind had been updated, we acquired a Golang RwMutex for reading, but if there was not a handler for that configuration kind, the read-lock would not be released. Golang's RwMutex are write-preferring, so acquiring multiple read-locks is allowed as long as there are no goroutines attempting to acquire a write-lock. When that happens, it will cause any future read-locks to block. On May 16, 2023,we introduced a new configuration kind, but we did not add a handler, which means that from this point on we were leaking read-locks, but the system was able to make progress.
May 8, 2023Recapping the SPC-Replit AI Hackathon
This is a guest post by South Park Commons. SPC is a community of 500+ builders, technologists, and domain experts with locations in San Francisco and New York City. The recent SPC-Replit AI hackathon brought together talented builders from the SPC community and Replit network to show off their technical chops and creativity by building cutting-edge AI applications. Participants had a week to develop a working demo that incorporated AI in some capacity and was built on Replit. From meal planning to baby-AGI's and even a bot that points out logical fallacies, these projects are proof of the limitless potential of AI. Check out the individual project highlights below! Dialectic - Improving Conversational Health - 1st Place 🥇 Team: Somudro Gupta & Casey Caruso
May 5, 2023Replit Bounties: AI-Powered Real Estate Recommendation Webapp
Problem Statement Christo Hefer is Founder and COO at Symplete, a real estate technology platform for agents to handle marketing and sales and help agents select the best purchase agreements for their listings. He wanted to create a prototype where a residential purchase agreement could be uploaded in PDF format and analyzed using OpenAI’s GPT-3 API. Based on 15-20 different fields as inputs, the best purchase agreement should be recommended to the agent. Building the Prototype To do this, the Bounty Hunter Syed (Repit username: cudanexus) used a Python Library to read the residential agreement PDF before sending it to GPT-3 to analyze. After that, he used the GPT-3 API to analyze the document and present the real estate agent with the optimal agreement for their listing. The parameters used included the address, price and offer expiry dates amongst others.
May 1, 2023Announcing Replit Extensions
At Developer Day, we revealed our commitment to increasing the extensibility of Replit to better serve the diverse needs of our community of makers and all developers. And today, we’re excited to announce a major milestone in our mission to empower a billion developers: the launch of Replit Extensions. Extending the Replit Environment Makers have an ever-present desire to have control over their tools. This is true in every creative domain, be it software, music, photography, or painting. What makes software unique is that much of the tooling is itself software, and with any mastery of software, you can begin to shape your tools to your needs. Making Replit extensible has been at the top of our minds since the beginning. We've been busy at work—we've iterated on our core primitives, our layout system, refactored our code towards modularity, allowed people to configure their Repls, and even replaced our code editor with one that's far more composable, with extensibility as one of the driving reasons. Over the last year, we explored security paradigms to create a safe yet flexible extension system that doesn’t compromise user or developer experiences. Stay tuned for upcoming blog posts detailing the ideas and prototypes we’ve tried along the way. After months of collaboration with our community members and beta testers, we are thrilled to officially release Extensions to everyone. Check out the Extension Store in a Repl to use extensions built by other Replit community members.
May 1, 2023Copyright Law in the Age of AI: The Role of Licensing in Replit's Development
Thousands of unique users code in Replit every day. Few of them probably give much thought to the copyright that attaches to their code. They might be surprised to learn that copyright – specifically, the way that Repls are licensed – is fundamental to the way that Replit works. As the AI software revolution proceeds apace, copyright law is again playing a fundamental role in how it develops – and in how Replit brings the benefits of this technology to our users. We’ll explain all in this blog post. But before we get there, time for a history lesson. A brief history of software licensing The relationship between copyright and computer software wasn’t always obvious, even to lawyers. Early versions of the Unix operating system, developed at Bell Labs in the 1970s, were distributed freely along with their source code, so that the recipients of the code could hack on it. Decades later this led to a copyright lawsuit, but following its settlement, entirely free distributions of Unix became legally available, with their components licensed under free software licenses such as the MIT license.
Apr 30, 2023Replit Bounties: Ship Code in Your Sleep
"Through Bounties, I was able to get high-quality developers that are able to fulfill a problem statement really fast. Replit’s Bounty Hunters ensure that the client is happy with the end product and have a high quality of work product.. and are interested in making the best versions of the apps possible." @girlbossintech | Software Engineer Introduction @girlbossintech is a software developer and Twitter creator. She wanted to test out an idea for a social polling app, similar to popular polling web apps like Gas App, where users would be served a question and could select an option, which would then take them to the next question. However, being busy with work, she decided to outsource the implementation of this idea. After seeing Replit Bounties on Twitter and receiving a recommendation from a friend, @girlbossintech decided to try it out. Building the Prototype
Apr 25, 2023A Recap of Replit Developer Day
At Developer Day, we announced: Production-grade Deployments straight from your IDE A more powerful Workspace Secure Workspace Extensions Replit’s From-Scratch Trained Code Complete model Production-grade Deployments Straight from your IDE