Dec 27, 2023Replit in Review: A Recap of What We Shipped in 2023
In 2023, we brought the vision of idea to software, fast, to reality. We shipped the first conversational AI programmer to code your ideas faster, made AI available for everyone, and introduced Deployments to ship from where you write your code. We made coding on Replit a better and more productive experience by redesigning the Console, Git integration, Packages tool, and more. We released the Replit Desktop App so you could choose the form factor that works best for you. We’re not finished making Replit the best place to code, but here are some highlights from the past year! Product (01/29) Git in the Shell - The first step in improving our Git integration. Git command-line tools were improved and integrated with your GitHub account, allowing access to your repositories. (02/14) Announcing Ghostwriter Chat - The first conversational AI programmer. Ghostwriter Chat is a beta release that acts as a proactive debugger and understands your project’s context, making it a powerful AI pair programmer.
Dec 26, 2023Introducing Spellburst, A Replit x Stanford HAI Collaboration
At Replit, we’re lucky to work with brilliant people who are building the programming tools of the future. This past year, we had the privilege of sharing some of this design work with the broader academic research community. Tyler, design engineer at Replit, teamed up with Stanford University (Jenny Han – also former Replit intern), Miroslav Suzara, Christopher Pondoc, and Dr. Hari Subramonyam) to publish Replit’s first-ever peer-reviewed publication, Spellburst. In November, we presented our work at the ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST), one of the premier venues for human-computer interaction research in the world. This post will walk through what we built and researched, what we learned from the process, and some predictions for user interface design and AI in the future. Introducing Spellburst We went into this project knowing that we wanted to design for learning and creativity for coders. In our formative study, we interviewed 10 expert generative artists to understand their existing workflows. What we discovered about the exploratory process for creative work is that creative coders are constantly: Going from idea to code
Nov 20, 2023Transitioning to Replit Core
Last week, we launched Replit Core - a singular membership plan that represents the end-to-end software builder experience. We heard a lot of excitement and questions, so we wanted to clarify Replit’s new membership model and what that means for Replit moving forward. We value our existing community that grew Replit to be the world's largest community of software builders, where anyone can create and learn how to go from idea to software. Along with last week's announcement, we wanted to honor your commitment to us by letting you keep your current monthly price. You will be upgraded to Replit Core for the remainder of your current subscription term. At this time, if you are on auto-renew, the next renewal will be at your current Hacker rate. In addition, members with a monthly Pro plan who would like to upgrade to Replit Core with our promotional pricing can now do so by visiting replit.com/pricing and selecting ‘Switch to yearly payment ($120)’. This will automatically cancel their current plan and switch them to the annual plan at the promotional rate. We’re on a mission to empower the next billion software creators and we’re excited about bringing the best of Replit under a unified membership plan. We firmly believe that $20 per month / $220 per year represents the best value in software development, and we aim to continue building on that value with your feedback in mind. For more information, check out the breakdown. Over the next few months, we will explore enhancements to the Replit workspace, AI, and Deployments improvements. We will pursue partnerships with other platforms to bring Replit members even more value. One of these perks is available today where Replit Core members enjoy a complimentary 4-month subscription to Perplexity Pro. Thanks for being a part of our builder journey as we continue to support yours.
Nov 14, 2023Announcing Replit Core - The Essential Membership for Builders
At Replit, we are on a mission to empower the next billion software creators. As we reflected on our mission and heard feedback from our community, we grew confident in our pursuit to create an end-to-end experience that represents the best developer tool membership in the market to go from idea to software, fast. Today, we’re excited to announce Replit Core, a singular plan that we aim to continue investing in for years to come. With Replit Core, you get: Access to advanced Replit AI features Save time and code faster with Replit's industry-leading AI coding assistant, currently powered by GPT-4. Debug code, get intelligent autocomplete suggestions, and convert natural language to code with one click.
Nov 6, 2023Prioritizing Employee Liquidity at Replit
Early in my career, a mentor shared the following. "For the next two years, you should join the highest profile startup you can, ignore everything else in your life, and work your ass off. After two years, quit, then go do it again. Do that as many times as you can so you get stock in as many startups as possible. Hopefully one of your lottery tickets hits so you can stop grinding and eventually live the life you want". I stayed at my first company for 11 years, during which I came to question the conventional wisdom. Indexing makes sense as an investment strategy, but I'm not sure it is the best approach if you want to solve a worthwhile problem, understand something deeply, or build something of quality that lasts. For this, a better approach is to focus and compound knowledge over a long period of time. Perhaps it was confirmation bias, but as I looked around at the companies I admired, I saw a pattern. As Steve Jobs reportedly said, “if you look closely, most overnight successes take a very long time”. There is an obvious counter to this. Most startups fail. Does long term knowledge compounding meaningfully change the odds to the point where it makes up for the risk concentration? For every celebrated long term success story, there are 1,000 obscure failures. How do you build a team that takes the long term approach to knowledge compounding, without encouraging reckless risk concentration? Replit just completed our first ever tender offer, through which current and former employees could get liquidity for their vested shares. Several Replit Employees told me in private this allowed them to pay off debt, buy a house, or look after their loved ones in a way that made a significant difference in their lives. Unlike my mentor’s advice, they were no longer worried about stacking up lottery tickets in the hope they could one day live the life they wanted. It allowed them to take a long term approach, without signing up for the delayed living plan. As long as I am here, and market conditions allow, we will fight to get employees liquidity on a regular basis. This is a high conviction bet that long term knowledge compounds wins. We are building the team with this in mind. If this resonates with you, come work here.
Oct 10, 2023Replit’s new AI Model now available on Hugging Face
At Replit, our mission is to empower the next billion software creators. Yesterday, we strengthened our commitment by announcing that Replit AI is now free for all users. Over the past year, we’ve witnessed the transformative power of building software collaboratively with the power of AI. We believe AI will be part of every software developer’s toolkit and we’re excited to provide Replit AI for free to our 25+ million developer community. To accompany AI for all, we’re releasing our new code generation language model Replit Code V1.5 3B on Hugging Face. We believe in open source language models – anyone can use it as a foundational model for application-specific fine-tuning without strict limitations on commercial use. Key Features Extensive Permissively Licensed Training Data: Trained on 1 trillion tokens of code from permissively licensed code from the Stack dataset and publicly available dev-oriented content from StackExchange. State of the Art Results: Leading HumanEval and Multi-PLe evaluation scores for a 3B code completion model. Broad Multi-Language Support: Encompasses Replit's top 30 programming languages with a custom trained 32K vocabulary for high performance and coverage.
Oct 9, 2023Announcing Replit AI for All
For every human endeavor, there inevitably arrives a moment when an innovation profoundly elevates the potential for productivity. For instance, communication was revolutionized by the invention of the printing press, and later, the Internet. After decades of steady progress, software is witnessing its disruption phase as well -- AI is redefining the whole software development lifecycle. AI is one of the key ingredients to go from idea to software, fast -- we witnessed this from over a year of experience in pioneering Ghostwriter Autocomplete and Chat. At Replit, we are on a mission to empower the next billion software creators. Over time, we gained full conviction that such a mission can’t be accomplished without putting our AI features in the hands of every Replit developer. Today, we’re making Replit AI available for everyone. Code completion and AI code assistance are now enabled by default, and available to 23M developers (and counting). Developers on the free plan will have access to our basic AI features, while Pro users will retain exclusive access to the most powerful AI models and advanced features. This was no easy feat, and required not only all our expertise in scaling distributed systems, but also training low-latency LLMs to serve Replit’s compute-heavy AI workloads. Emboldened by the strong performance we obtained with training and serving replit-code-v1-3b, today we are also releasing replit-code-v1.5-3b, a state-of-the-art 3B LLM trained on 1T tokens from a code-heavy pretraining mixture. The dataset includes 30 programming languages and a dev-oriented subset of StackExchange. We will gradually roll out our new code LLM in the next few days, making code completion on the Replit AI code editor even more powerful. Our roadmap for the near future can be summarized in one sentence: AI will redefine every single Replit feature. It won’t be necessary to mention that AI plays a fundamental role every time software is being edited or deployed -- soon we will take it for granted.
Sep 27, 2023Replit Core: Go from idea to software, fast
The Replit Core subscription is the best developer tool subscription in the market to go idea to software, fast. And it is the most valuable. A similar dev environment can cost up to 10x more on GitHub Codespaces, and a high usage app will get crushed with overages 3-4x more expensive on Vercel (source). This end-to-end offering makes Replit Core the best subscription to build and launch your business. HeyDATA.org has gone from first line to +$200k ARR, and as founder, Steve Moraco says: "I don't think I would ever be able to complete a project like this without Replit. I started not knowing anything about web development, or even GitHub for that matter, and I've sort of just learned one skill at a time. I’ve gone from knowing almost nothing about technical development, to building a business and earning money" - Steve Moraco The Core bundle includes: 8 GiB RAM & 4 vCPU cloud-based development environment with no limits on usage, giving a powerful building experience Replit AI, powered by market-leading models (currently GPT-4). Debug, autocomplete, and turn natural language into code with one-click.
Sep 5, 2023Announcing Autoscale and Static Deployments
Today, we are announcing our biggest release yet. Scalable hosting infrastructure directly from the editor. This release transforms Replit into an end-to-end platform to go from idea to production for your next project or startup. Two new products are immediately available to all Hacker and Pro subscribers: Autoscale Deployments - Infrastructure that scales up when your app goes viral and scales down when your app goes unused. Only pay for the resources you use. Static Deployments - Free option to host client-side sites like blogs and websites. Best of all, it's directly from the editor. Deploy to scalable infrastructure directly from the place you build. No additional vendors. Just Replit.
Sep 5, 2023Speeding up Deployments with Lazy Image Streaming
Replit Deployments is our new offering that allows you to quickly go from idea, to code, to production. To make the experience as seamless as possible, we built tooling to convert a Repl into a container imager which can be deployed to either a Google Cloud Virtual Machine or to Cloud Run. Early on, we started to hit some issues with large images taking too long to deploy to a virtual machine. It could take minutes to pull and unpack the container image before it could be started. There’s two angles of attack: reduce the image size or speed up the pulling of images. It's preferable to shrink the container image size; however, that is not always possible. In this post we’ll go into some of the technologies and approaches used to speed up image pulling/booting. What is a container image? First, we’ll need to establish some baseline knowledge around container images. If you already know the details, you can skip this section. At a high level, a container image provides both a root filesystem and configuration for running a containerized workload. Inside the container, the filesystem is mounted to the root directory /. The root filesystem is stored as a list of multiple compressed tarballs, called layers, which are overlaid on top of each other. That is, if two layers have the same file, layers later in the list have higher precedence and their files replace the files from lower layers.
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, 2023The Journey To Code Search
Finding that one comment, class, or function in your codebase is important. You might not always know where to look... which is why we created a brand new Code Search tool! From simple queries to regular expressions it has never been easier to get work done on Replit. The new Code Search tool supports queries with word filters, regular expressions, include patterns, exclude patterns, as well as replacements (with regular expression capture group support) so that you can find what you need and make refactors on larger codebases quickly and efficiently. Try it out now on Replit! But don't forget to come back to this post so we can bring you on our Journey to Code Search. How It All Started
Jun 24, 2023Internship 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 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.