Replit AI for All | Hacker News Reader

Replit AI for All

blog.replit.com

66 pointstodsacerdoti20 comments

Repl.it has really gone off the deep end. Ages ago, it was a nice quick site to quickly get in, test out some code, and get out. Now when I visit, it's just a big marketing splash page and a bunch of links. I don't even know how to open a basic Python REPL.

Also the CEO (Amjad Masad) bullied and threatened a college student working on open-source to shut down their project, and then continued to deny any wrongdoing on HN. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27424195

> Also the CEO (Amjad Masad) bullied and threatened a college student working on open-source to shut down their project

Rewriting it:

> Also the CEO (Amjad Masad) bullied and threatened a college student (who had interned at repl.it previously and was familiar enough to be e-mailing the CEO back and forth) working on open-source (an open-source product very similar to repl.it) to shut down their project

Saying his project is very similar to tell.it is like saying hackernews is very similar to Facebook because they both have text boxes and a reply button.

tell.it? I thought the CEO told him to take down "Riju: fast online playground for every programming language"

https://intuitiveexplanations.com/tech/replit/#what-was-my-o...

It looks like an auto-correct typo (I believe they meant "repl.it")

I'm not sure what your point is. Are you peeved because I left out some details?

You can read the thread I linked. Riju.codes is no more similar to Repl.it than any of the other hundreds of online multi-language REPLs. The argument that the Masad made (that Radon copied internal secrets from repl.it) were unfounded, and the numerous attempts from Radon to ask for clarification yielded silence from Masad.

Just tested this. Pretty terrible compared to copilot. It's almost as if the context of the function isn't accounted for but makes suggestions based on the current or previous line. I'm assuming replit must be used mostly for educational purposes as I can't understand why any developer would use a sub-par IDE / environment for production services. If that assumption is correct then surely a terrible AI assistant would be counter productive for learning purposes.

What’s the value proposition of using Replit over GitHub/CoPilot/CodeSpaces. I primarily do serverless development (so our deployments are a bit easier), but I don’t see what the value sell is here.

im confused too. replit was nice when it gave me a repl. now its a strange in-browser IDE and container/app hosting.

I’m pretty sure they are just trying to hop on the AI hype train, I see no value

And you probably can’t turn it off in replit education teams if the other feature are anything to go by. Going to have to re-evaluate.

Check the "AI" button at the bottom left of the editor panel -- it allows you to enable/disable code completion on the spot.

the user is probably a teacher interested in disabling it for their students

I was interested to read (WSJ so I won't link - I read on reader mode...) that Microsoft was earlier this year losing between $20 - $80 per user per month on Github Copilot, due to the expense of running the thing.

It seems like LLM-based AI (at least at the moment) is inverting the old model of software being expensive to develop but with only marginal costs to run.

(I still don't know who replit's target customers are, and this hasn't really helped clear this up).

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37827955

https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/ais-costly-buildup-could-make-ea...

Reminder that Replit's CEO bullied an open-source maintainer into killing his independent project: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27424195

Replit is doing a lot of interesting work in pioneering user interfaces for AI-enhanced development and finally getting programming off the desktop. Still, it remains to be seen how viable a product that really is.

“Finally getting programming off the desktop”

Why is that good?

I suppose we have to eradicate every last corner where there is privacy and autonomy and someone isn’t charging rent.

People owning their own code? That’s so pre cloud.

I agree. While I had some initial enthusiasm at cloud-based dev environments (and they might make sense in a corporate setting), I've put the breaks on that once I thought ahead of where the corporations were likely leading this. No thanks.

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