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ramon156
simonw
This is a style of writing called "narrative journalism" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narrative_journalism
I find it pretty distracting too.
ActionHank
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.
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paglaghoda
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
mbesto
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.
epiccoleman
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!
echelon
How long do those customers stay customers?
Are their customers making money?
Will they be able to build retention?
I've got this question of every platform like this - Lovable, etc.
Cursor and IDE tools and models cater to a smaller audience, but they're sticky, repeat customers, big spenders.
sieep
Excellent point. With that being said, I think there is market potential for replit, specifically in the middle ground between 'not knowing any code' and 'full on developer using an IDE/Cursor'.
tchock23
I'm not sure why you're getting downvoted. These are valid criticisms of platforms like Lovable, Bolt, Replit, etc. that cater to "fast MVP" type customers. I'm not sure how you sustain the valuations if the churn inherent to those type of "hobbyist" or "solopreneur" type customers isn't solved.
jokethrowaway
Why don't you just use Claude?
I don't get all these vibe coding tools when Claude is better than any of them
CharlieDigital
A friend used Replit to prove out a startup (it worked) and what worked for him is that Replit has a whole platform integrated with their coding assistant that include hosting and backend runtimes. So his cycle time of vibe-deploy-test was very short and very simple for someone non-technical.
No need to think about how/where to deploy, cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, Azure), etc. Just vibe and deploy.
(He did end up moving off the platform once he had enough validation)
tim333
I think experienced programmers underestimate how tricky it is to sort the deploying to cloud platforms bit for beginners.
mbesto
> (He did end up moving off the platform once he had enough validation)
I'm really curious what this looks like in practice? Like can you just download the whole codebase, throw it against a Supabase Postgres DB, and you're off running? What about any backing services or microservices? Is it tied to any thing like lambdas etc.
paglaghoda
claude is just too expensive and u need to atleast a bit technical expertise in it.
replit has made it like, even a 11 year old can make something out of thin air and acutally publish it to get a link to share
infecto
Third world country could be region blocked.
Not sure why this is controversial. I know it’s an issue with Cursor as they have to limit availability of models based on region. OpenAI specifically blocks India and Pakistan for example, among a long list of other countries.
sometimes_all
Why would anyone region-block a country which gives them a ton of users? OpenAI actually has India-specific plans alongside their regular ones, and I use Claude Code every day with zero problems.
paglaghoda
i'm not aware of any service geo-blocked by OpenAI to either pakistan or india
Could u share a link or something?
P.s. found nothing on a google search
jacooper
Because i can do it on the phone.
jimmySixDOF
If your optimizing for simple, powerful, and on mobile then Replit is hard to beat.
truetraveller
which country are you from?
coffeemug
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.
bko
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.
ugh123
It sounds like you're mainly responding and reacting to what people (and media) choose to write about him (a narrative revolving around his political beliefs), rather than how he (mostly) goes about his day to day.
coffeemug
Eh people get consumed by these things. It's very hard to resist when you have a platform and your own people are at war. Very very difficult to get past abstractions and just work to help in minute particulars.
Plus social media is a uniquely deranging technology. Persona on twitter is rarely who the person is in real life.
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SwtCyber
So success buys you ideological latitude
ramon156
Do you know how many politicians switch sides once they have lost their power? (well, not many have been in that situation, but still!)
As a powerful figure, you become a literal puppet in front of the public. Your opinions don't matter
overfeed
Billionaires wouldn't run their mouths, if that wasn't the case.
mikestorrent
What's the minimum threshold for that, I wonder?
overfeed
Having "Fuck You" money[1] means you don't have to listen to anyone (but you still can be shunned, as described in the article). You'll substantially greater wealth that FU money to make people listen to what you have to say and be "uncancellable", like owning a media outlet, hiring a PR firm, or buying a pet politician or seat in government. Amjad seems to have crossed from the former to the latter by economic power: not only can a deal with him now could potentially generate lots of wealth, but it may not be a good thing to be on his shit-list later when he is the bigger fish.
1. A subjective amount that depends entirely on the lifestyle, burn rate and life expectancy.
mikestorrent
Well, for the sake of being an aspiring contrarian, more power to him. Last thing I want is billionaires all being unified around one opinion.
adolph
Effect weakly linked to Affect
terespuwash
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.
nerdsniper
https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=amasad
Yep. Seems like he posts a bit more thoughtfully with deliberation ever since the "suing my intern over a weekend project" debacle.
Having other close friends from Jordan, it's not surprising that he's outspoken on the topic of Israeli occupation - it's very difficult to spend a significant amount of time in the affected regions and not come away with a very strong opinion.
jwblackwell
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
kelvinjps10
I remember learning to code with replit, the people from the course recommended replit because there was no setup to do
jamesbelchamber
I used to teach with it - at classroom-scale it was really good. Unfortunately they shut all that down a little while back, and there wasn't really a good replacement. Which was a shame.
Seems to have worked out for them, mind!
kelvinjps10
Such a shame, it was really good for that
bdcravens
Some criticize that approach, suggesting that you're not learning important skills, but I applaud that approach. Anyone who's ever been in a workshop at a conference, where you have limited time to learn a topic, knows how much time is wasted doing initial setup.
miningape
yes this is such a good point, the OG replit could've been the perfect conferencing / classroom tool
Running an IDE in a browser like that is not something I'd ever want to work with long time or experimenting on my "own" computer - maybe it's just me being weird but running the code on the metal I'm holding is much more satisfying.
I'm not sure what features / tools replit had in this regard, but I could easily see it dominating CS education and conferences as the go-to IDE. (then making the real money by monetising the students in the future, i.e. other tools you can sell - even something like replit as a cloud provider), by having features like
- templates you could share (i.e. one per lesson)
- live sessions (where the professor could log into many students replit instance and demonstrate)
- videos built into the editor / streaming / conferencing
- "homework had-in" features, automated test sharing, etc.kelvinjps10
I remember that was like workshop, something like learn to code in 20 minutes, and after learning the concepts and realizing you can control all those devices that power the world, just with code was magical.
I think that it had a big potential for that.
mannanj
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.
danpalmer
Unsurprising, the Diary of a CEO guy is a snake oil salesman. Awful interviewer, but very good at self promotion.
mannanj
Snake oil salesman is a rather deceptive and false accusation isn't it? He's launched, invested in and maintains success in multi-million and billion dollar companies. Snake oil sales don't get you that far.
jrochkind1
The idea of "advanced users" of vibe coding is interesting.
indigodaddy
exe.dev is already miles better already than what replit is attempting to do with it's AI things
kaicianflone
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.
foobarian
In the immortal words of Peter Stormare in the VW ad, "what does this do??"
mikestorrent
Well, at some point in time, his workflow produces a landing page where you can express interest in funding his projects
kaicianflone
My momma always told me I'd be criticized by people who never build anything :)
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kaicianflone
The bane of intelligence is contempt instead of curiosity
sd9
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.
terespuwash
Your comment fails to mention that the accusations of sympathy for terrorism are lies.
sd9
I am not equipped to give an opinion on that either way. I’m just saying that building a successful business is independent of the accuracy of your ideology.
wulfstan
I think this is partly true. Raising the necessary funds, hiring enough of the right people and become sufficiently visible to get "mindshare" are all important factors in building a successful business. It is a lot harder to do these things if your ideology is out of step with what is considered mainstream.
nephihaha
Fair comment. They are two different things.
prmoustache
[flagged]
tim333
It was kind of the focus of the article though - how his pro Palestinian politics interacted with being a SV founder.
It also fitted with some @paulg twitter stuff. He wrote a fair bit about both Gaza and Replit.
paganel
> It also fitted with some @paulg twitter stuff.
TIL. Big fair-play to him, and I'm very sincere about it, he must of have left a lot of potential money on the table from possible investors as a result of his view on the genocide in Gaza. Again, fair play to him, we need a lot more people like him in our (pretty sad) industry from this point of view.
tdeck
Just look at Tal Broda for one example.
sillyfluke
As far as I can tell, nowhere does the article argue that being "terrorist symphathizer" and being a successful business person are mutually exculsive, so you seem to be arguing against a point no one made.
What is obvious is that people should be outraged if a successful businessperson is actually a "terrorist sympathizer", because most people, whatever their ideology, would simply consider it to be an outrageous and ridiculous state of affairs if a successful businessperson was allowed to function unimpeded in western society and its business world if they themselves considered the businessperson to be an unapologetic "terrorist sympathizer".
The title is clearly an enagement ploy by the editor because it forces the reader to decide whether they themselves believe the founder is actually a terrorist sympathizer or not. If they don't think so, then it's outrageous that he's been libelled in a such a manner. If they think he is a terrorist sympathizer then it would be outrageous to them that he is allowed to operate unimpeded in western society and its economic realm.
That's why this comment sounds disingenously pedantic and your follow-up comment's detached tone doesn't feel sincere frankly. The article does list specific reasons why he was called a "terrorist sympathizer" and forces the reader to decide whether they themselves would consider the founder a "terrorist sympathizer" given the context in order to come to a conclusion about him in general.
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a456463
Nothing like paying someone to shill for you.
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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.