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Comment by gmaster1440 | Hacker News Reader

This is one of those examples for me where the idea is far superior than the implementation. The idea of anyone being able to quickly write code from anywhere, as the main promo video suggests, is fantastic and greatly motivating. In practice, coding on an iPhone (even with an innovative new joystick), is gimmicky at best, given how deeply ingrained good ergonomics are in the coding process.

I struggle to see this as one of those "bicycle for the mind" products, hope I'm wrong!

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This is mostly aimed at people who don't have the luxury of coding from a computer.

See this tweet from the CEO: https://twitter.com/amasad/status/1582754947480793093

> We partnered with @TeamMindjoy to test the app by teaching girls how to code in a South African township and we made a video about it. During this time the wifi was super unstable and the few laptops they had were unusable, but kids continued to code on $100 Android phones!

Yes we have stories from all over the world where people are using mobile to build real things. There is a kid in Egypt, for example, that built discord bots for a living on his phone.

Additionally there are also lots of cases were fairly well off folks with access to desktop computers and wifi that find themselves with a phone and want to prototype an idea or make a quick change to a project. I’ve been using it and I find it relaxing to lay back on the couch and do some fun coding. Especially with Ghostwriter (our Copilot-like thing: https://blog.replit.com/ai) it’s super usable. I built large part of my toy Lisp in Python in the app while in the park, waiting at the doctor’s office, or simply relaxing after a long day: https://replit.com/@amasad/Lisp-in-Python

I appreciate the spirit but you are going to destroy your eyes doing that. At least grab a tablet.

Just own a tablet? How?

I use google remote desktop to check on some IDE code and sometimes need to type a bit of code and the default keyboard is useless...

I'd pay just for the joystick keyboard.

> I built large part of my toy Lisp in Python in the app while in the park

I’m pretty nerdy but you win by a wide margin

> During this time the wifi was super unstable

Unless I'm doing something wrong it seem that you still have to be online to create and run code.

This may be an example of skating to where the puck is at.

Consider that the new iPad has the same power as a desktop and can be used with a desktop monitor. (This is the $450 version.) You can also connect an iPhone to a display to an HDMI monitor, but they haven't done the work to have a desktop mode yet. Android desktop mode but they haven't been . If iphone cracks it, android will have to catch up.

Phones have the power today and they have the storage today. It's just missing the work and make an external keyboard and storage display a first class experience.

And the moment you can can add a $100 monitor, a $15 cable, and a $40 bluetooth keyboard/mouse combo, you are at a developer machine for about $150 over their phone that they have anyway.

What do you call a phone with a big external keyboard and display?

A developer machine like that is already $150, called a Chromebook or a Raspberry Pi.

Chromebooks and raspberry pis don’t detach from their keyboard and display to become mobile smartphones

For folks in the global south who might own a smartphone but not a macbook, a native mobile dev env is god-sent. For others, the Replit mobile app is but a start, even if it looks like a toy, and can help in building only toy apps, and deal only with toy codebases. This is a start in the right direction.

Besides, in the future, more advances in AI might mean, folks only need to key in prompts.

I work on iSH, which is in a similar product area. The thing is that by all intents and purposes the environment we give you is terrible: you have a software keyboard, and navigating around and typing is pretty bad. But we have plenty of users who love it and use it really heavily. Why? A lot are children who have phones but can’t always access a computer. Some people want to code on the go. They’re really doing it out of necessity when they don’t have another device, not because the experience we provide is good. There’s definitely room for improvement but I doubt using a phone will ever be as pleasant as using a computer. And that’s fine.

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