After nine years of grinding, Replit found its market. Can it keep it? | Hacker News Reader

After nine years of grinding, Replit found its market. Can it keep it?

techcrunch.com

158 pointstoomanyrichies136 comments

I've used Replit for educational materials when teaching beginners Python and JavaScript. They had a nice product called Teams for Education. It was even announced that it'll become fully free (the original blog post with the announcement was deleted from their website) [0], but soon after that the company had pivoted to AI and later discontinued the Teams for Education completely [1].

I also used Replit's embedded widgets for occasional lessons, but they kept changing the UI and behavior, making it difficult to write consistent reliable documentation for beginners.

I think by now it's clear that the product is not meant for educators, like it was originally, so that's ok.

[0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20240924020257/https://blog.repl...

[1]: https://blog.replit.com/update-on-teams-for-education

Oh you brought back fond memories of using the very first education product Replit had. It was so good. I was teaching GCSE CS and having a blast giving kids python with turtle to play with. I would just give them some multicoloured octagon and more complex shape, and they had to draw it with turtle.

They enjoyed it, I enjoyed it, and the teacher UX was great.

Libre Office has a Logo implementation built in. You can have turtles whizzing around your documents and spreadsheets.

> But the technical achievement wasn’t translating into revenue growth, and by last year, with the company at 130 employees and burning through cash, Masad said he had to make a painful decision. “I looked at our burn, and I looked at our progress on our revenue chart, and it just didn’t make any sense. The business wasn’t viable.” Replit cut its headcount by 50%, bringing it down to around 60 to 70 people at its lowest point.

> Plus, Replit has another unusual advantage for a startup: a $350 million war chest. Despite raising $100 million in 2023, the company “hadn’t touched” those funds by the time it raised this latest round, Masad told me. The company is capital efficient by design, though Masad joked that as an entrepreneur who grew up watching his refugee father struggle, “one thing I need to learn is to be less frugal and start spending money.”

Wow, so, connecting these dots:

- reducing headcount by 50% down to ~70 people = firing 70 people

- at a generous estimate of total burdened cost of $1M/person/year, that's $70M/year

- which accounts for a full 5 years of that war chest

- and, moreover, "at its lowest point" suggests that perhaps Replit has expanded headcount again since; the article mentions that it has done some acqui-hires.

Levels.fyi shows Replit salaries in the $200k–300k range, so even at a 2× burden rate, I think that this is probably a significant overestimate of the costs.

Firing 70 people when you have $100 million that you haven't touched, have raised money on top of that, and have many years of runway for the people you fired… comes together to paint a picture that is, imho, less than flattering.

Ehh. I don’t love it and it isn’t good optics, but if you can’t find a way to utilize your employeees (such as having a hard time finding a maeket fit for an existing product) then it isn’t your moral obligation to keep paying them. It isn’t clear what employees were laid off ir for what reason either.

The original sin was probably hiring those people for a not-yet-clear business in the first place…

Yes, the people who did those hirings should probably be let go as well. But eventually, it is the CEO and the board who are responsible and they seem to never pay a price for their poor action / inaction.

Yes, let's forbid startups! /s

Yeah, the point here is nuanced, but let's do an argumentum ad absurdum instead /s

Probably the _best_ advice I got from the entire startup community is, "don't scale without PMF". The saving grace here is that they didn't scale beyond 140 people, so the damage is limited. And they didn't double down on something that would have dropped the whole thing down.

But as a founder, I'd consider it a failure of planning on my part if I had to lay off 50% of my workforce (a failure nobody is immune to, but a failure nonetheless).

That's not an argumentum ad absurdum. The whole point of a startup is to try to build a business based on a as-of-yet unproven business model, which usually involves hiring people.

If you need that many people to (dis)prove viability.. I don't know. Hard to judge from the outside, though easy to judge in hindsight.

It is not a sin to hire people when you aren't 100% confident your business is going to succeed. That's just how startups work.

Some people are not in a position in their life to take any risk of losing their job, and that's perfectly understandable, but those people should not take a job at a startup.

A sustainable business can pay more employees than a failed startup. And pivoting with 150 employees is nearly impossible; all those people were hired for a different business.

Hilariously naive comment - "if you have money you should spend it on salaries". This is not a charity, it's a transaction, the salary is paid in exchange for revenue generating activities or supporting activities in a viable business. If the business is only doing 2.7mill in ARR, then it's entirely valid for the whole lot to get laid off.

It’s not about being a charity, the entire point of startups is to trade capital for time to market. If the CEO doesn’t know what to do with 130 people they don’t know what to do with 70.

What are you talking about? How does it follow that "if they don't know what to do with 130, they also don't know what to do with 70"? This is literally capital allocation, the decision was that the people laid off couldn't be deployed effectively within this particular org. But maybe they would be effective elsewhere. Don't take this stuff personally, else the working world will always be difficult.

Its a business, not a charity. Just because they have money doesnt mean they should spend on people who arent contributing to the bottom line.

What information do you have that they weren't contributing to the bottom line?

The CEO saying "the business isn't viable" says a lot.

That sounds a lot like the CEO is throwing 50% of the company under the bus for his own failures to you know, make the business viable.

And would it be better that the whole 100% go under the bus for his own failures?

It’s better for startup investors if it goes big or fails sooner. That’s the entire purpose of investing 100’s of millions into these companies.

If the CEO has no idea how to do that they should shut down the company or stand aside and find a better CEO, not try and milk as much money from they can by keeping the company shambling along as long as possible.

Did I suggest that? I'm pointing out the blaring hypocrisy of a company sitting on $350M in cash that opted to double the size of their company without having a clear strategy to become profitable. Then after laying off half the company, the CEO publicly states it's because the laid off workers don't have the skills they need for "the new era". I would really like to see in these scenarios the CEO accept a tiny bit of responsibility for their failures to set strategy and over hire, instead of publicly shaming 70 people they chose to hire in the first place. That's a failure in leadership, not in employees.

>the CEO publicly states it's because the laid off workers don't have the skills they need for "the new era".

Where did he say this?

If they thought they would make more money on net with the employees than without them, they wouldn't have laid them off?

130 employees making <$3m in revenue seven years in means you have to do something else. The information we all have now is that the bottom line is not very much so whatever they were contributing to the bottom line can't be that much.

You have to go find a different business when this happens.

What information do you have that they were contributing to the bottom line?

The burden of proof lies with the person making the claim (even if implicitly), not with the person questioning the claim.

$2.8m revenue with 130 employees is about $21,000 per employee.

The numbers here don't look good.

This has nothing to do with charity. Every employee can contribute to the bottom line. It is the company's responsibility to organize and empower its employees in such a way that added value is created. If this is not achieved, the employees have still given up their time and must be compensated for it.

You are welcome to optimize your processes so that you no longer need any employees. But society will still consist of people who need money. And if you don't pass on the surplus you have accumulated in the form of salaries, they will get what they need from you by other means.

This guy is exactly like the get quick rich scheme guys.

I believe he initially had a vision for the product but now the whole schpiel is quotes like "a kid made $180k on an app in 4 weeks" like he was on and on about in podcasts.

Ok if its so easy, why don't you use your own website to do a bunch of $180k / m apps? How many companies can have employees produce 12 different apps per year and a combined revenue of $2.1m per employee? Also everyone can do it so you can pay them minimum wage you don't need developers.

But of course nobody is going to make any successful apps other than the people in the marketing materials.

Sounds like these guys kind of flailed around for almost a decade and then jumped on the AI bandwagon. Nothing wrong with that, I’m just surprised someone decided to bankroll them for so long. Also not sure how successful they’ll be long term, since they’re presumably a wrapper around one of the big three in a highly competitive space.

> I’m just surprised someone decided to bankroll them for so long.

When you are PROFITABLE (but not as profitable as your investors would like) you can run FOREVER without anyone "bankrolling" you. It's a foreign concept in the AI world (and sometimes it feels like it's foreign to the tech startup world) but quite effective.

Even if you are profitable your investors could pressure you to exit to some other company so that they can recoup their investment. But I doubt they were profitable. Going by the article they had about 100 employees and about $2M in revenue before they downsized. Assuming a median salary of $100k that would put their payroll alone at $10M. But the napkin math is kinda beside the point because they did keep raising money [1].

[1] https://pitchbook.com/profiles/company/113831-02

Maybe $100k gets you one fresh grad in Bay Area but outside of OECD countries it may get you several middle engineers. I bet most startups outsource their development after the first few core developers.

What do you think would be a better estimate for average salary if we assume heavy offshoring?

Depends from country to country. I live in India so I can chip in on the situation I suppose and give my/(India's?) perspective on this.

So firstly, it would depend if they are doing remote-job/offshoring directly to a dev or if they are contacting a consultancy instead.

A consultancy can seriously bloat the amount of cost but usually non tech are the ones going to a consultancy but in a consultancy very few (like 5%-10%) goes to the actual workers and they are paid from a fresh dev very low amount of money and I would be going on the high end if I said that they paid something like 16k usd for a complete junior and 40k usd would actually put you at a seriously senior level

Though even the 16k can make a very decent living in India.

My brother works at a company (he freelances as well but parents want security so doesn't do it full time) and he earns around 16k usd from the company but 4x the amount of money through freelancing directly

My cousin works at a company and he's working for 4 years now and he could be considered as maybe senior in just a few years and his salary is 30k USD

my brother actually works at one such consultancy and he mentions that most of the companies are actually non-tech which go to consultancies so I am assuming that since replit is a tech company they are doing remote-job

Now I know that my brother has been approached by companies to do full time but its just risky to work in a startup with the current hiring freeze and he manages to do both somehow I would consider that something like 40-60k (60k as an higher end for a great developer), as always things can even reach 70k sometimes but I am talking on a more average basis of sorts.

Off topic but as someone genuinely interested in this craft, (well I am not sure about coding itself, I have coded but I like golang and sys-admin right now, I want to do so much in this software craft and sometimes I am overwhelmed but its so exciting but I genuinely like tinkering/using linux and making software like alternative frontends for some website which blocked me (doubtnut -> doubt.nanotimestamps.org for my own usecase, I code / use LLM's to solve problems I am facing right now or I am curious about and also recently built a custom liveiso for cachy)

Gotta go hand copy some papers oof. Have a nice day!

You can get to 70k USD in India?? That’s approaching European salaries for a Senior Dev. Lots of Indians seem to come to Europe for far lower salaries.

well I was saying if you are working for 10 years sure.

I can only speak for my brother's company in that sense that if he works there for many years, their chain of ranking would make him a partner in the company (sort of like how layer firms get) and then he would get a flat huge commission on every project he takes and there are some 10 lakhs inr or 12 grand usd as an example and so like it isn't hard to get some really juicy money later down the pipeline.

Though like what I am saying 70k is for like genuinely the most top like 0.0001% or almost never unless for the extremely top official with shit ton of experience like 10-15-20 years

On the other hand, its rather comparatively easy to take a remote job from US and do it from india to get the same 70k which I have seen a hella lot more people do/ is the more practical approach for many.

I don't know but internally speaking 12 grand a year and even 60 grand seems small but its shit boat ton of money but still my mind compared it to the 120k salary guys of the beautiful united states and maybe that's why I overinflated some numbers.

if you have any questions, feel free to ask, I can uh refer to you to my brother if you have any doubts since I am currently in high school.

If OpenAI and Anthropic's models are good enough at coding to make coding agents useful for non-technical employees Replit is targeting, why can't either of those companies use their AI to build a wrapper around their product as good or better than Replit? Has this guy never taken n -> infinity in a problem before?

OpenAI taking an interest wouldn't be so bad for Replit. Since YC boasts that being incestuous is an upside of YC, ie selling your product to other YC companies, it is possible that OpenAI does the decent thing an outright buys Replit. It is rather likely that Altman and Masad have some sort of relationship going back to their YC days.

Replit has a lot of "value" that's actually dead weight that's going to fall by the wayside as AI gets better and humans move out of the loop. Cursor and the IDE agent companies have the same problem. They need to cannibalize their products to build for the fully autonomous engineering future, but I'm 95% certain that they won't, and the business that DO focus on full automation and moving the human out of the loop will eat their lunch.

Why would OpenAI buy Replit? My point is, if Sam's model is so great and advanced, it should be able to autonomously code a replacement. Or Cursor, or any of the others.

The funding round is all that matters. Now he can pay himself 15 million per year plus a severance package and he’s made it.

Bingo. Us plebs are busy thinking about long term plans.

I don't think they can keep it. What they have has already been replicated by the big guys, with just maybe a few months delay. It seems like they're usually going in the right direction, even ahead of others, but it's usually not any massive breakthrough, they're just being good at executing quickly the natural next steps.

Is miss repl.it for what it used to be, just a quick way to play with a bit of code.

We used to use it for coding interviews during COVID. It never struck me as anything special and I'm not convinced saddling it with AI improvements it's prospects. In fact it might make them worse given it's general applicability to learning which will surely be surpressed by the worries of an AI takeover.

Same, but that doesn’t justify half a billion dollars in investment.

I've used it for creating a template for an app. It usually creates a pretty accurate app with at least a basic UI and some interactions. The biggest issue is that once you've created the template, it's pretty tough to add some more complicated features using the AI.

This has been my experience also.

You gotta give it detailed instructions for everything at the start. You can't just build as you go, because every time it adds something it breaks something else.

I've never used replit but I'm curious what types of choices the app makes when building. Like how does it decide on the architecture, backend language, frontend framework, etc? Even if the non-technical user is unaware of the tech choices being made, the AI still has to make such decisions. How does it decide?

It just starts and makes it up as it goes.

One token at a time.

If it has detailed context of exactly what the entire app will need to do before writing any code, the first tokens will be more likely to build an architecture that works well in a language and framework that is suited for it.

If the initial context is thin on details, it will still pick an architecture, language, and framework but it may not be the best fit for the end goal. After those choices are made that just becomes more context, and it likely would never consider whether the language is now wrong and the entire codebase should be started fresh with a new language or framework.

> because every time it adds something it breaks something else.

standard ai workflow

Easily prevented with good test coverage IME. Not sure how that works in Replit though.

It's strange that their buzzwords are "to democratize programming"... isn't that already done very well with all the online free tools, documentation, tutorials, learning paths, etc?

Both AI and traditional programming paths share the same initial huge obstacle which is full access to a computer and the internet?

I'm not sure how AI is democratizing programming

You need to read between the lines: in boardroom speak, to "democratize" something usually means to dilute its rarity, usually to eliminate some party's bargaining power.

Pretty much every company that says that eventually ends up spending 100% of the time catering to and trying to sign enterprises, and actively disdains supporting individual customers.

personally, the evolution of replit makes me sad. i remember writing some of my very first ever programs in python using replit in middle school, as it wasn't blocked by the school network and it was the best way of running arbitrary code online back then. i used it to execute java code for AP computer science in high school, and i improved a ton at using the terminal as well. At some point, I stopped using the replit web editor and was coding by full-screening the built-in terminal and using vim. it was a formative experience and really helped me develop as a programmer even though all i had access to was a locked-down chromebook. but now, going back to the website and seeing the first thing it shows to you is how you can "build apps using AI", not even being able to even create an environment to run some python code without talking to an LLM, and the company focusing on ARR and becoming "AI-native" and creating value and all that jazz, and it feels like the magic of learning to code for the first time has been lost. luckily, kids these days are spoiled with webassembly and can run pretty much whatever they want in the browser, so i'm sure the next generation of young programmers will be alright

You should be grateful and happy for the people that helped you in your journey, they made it! You know, apps are not AI (yet), what you used for free was built by someone that deserves the success.

But that’s true of everything we use. Someone made that fork you use. That plate. The shoes you wear. Same for an app. You don’t deserve anything. If you make something, and release it into the world, you have a responsibility. Not a reward. A reward may come. People may pay you for your services or your novelty but in no way shape or form are you deserving of it. Deserving of something is a 3rd person observation. You can not demand that you deserve anything.

> But that’s true of everything we use. Someone made that fork you use

I paid a fair price for my forks and plates and shoes, I don't need to be grateful for that. Using a platform for free and then complaining that now they focus on making money is not the same.

> Deserving of something is a 3rd person observation. You can not demand that you deserve anything.

I'm not OP nor Replit owner.

>I paid a fair price for my forks and plates and shoes, I don't need to be grateful for that. Using a platform for free and then complaining that now they focus on making money is not the same.

They were focused on making money back then too. Nobody's complaining that they were trying to make money!

If someone is grateful that the old product existed at the time, because it helped them, it's completely understandable and valid that they'd be sad that it no longer exists to help other people. What there is now has a hundred almost-the-same alternatives[0]; it sounds like what they used to be was unique.

[0] the article quotes a claim about “the first agent-based coding experience in the world” "last fall" but that seems to ignore not-as-successful earlier things like AutoGPT that had code agent projects by early 2024 if not before, with initial "agent" behavior in 2023.

I agree so much with this. I used Replit extensively to prototype things in different languages and share my work with my teammates, who could then suggest tweaks to my ideas. We never came close to the limits of the free tier, but I paid for it anyway because I loved the product.

The magic is definitely gone.

FWIW you can still start from template environments by going to "Developer Frameworks," picking an example language, and clicking "Remix."

It's not as nice as before though. I miss when free accounts could have unlimited projects.

Amjad is one of the only leaders in tech (along with Paul Graham) speaking out against Israel's apartheid and genocide. He also happens to be Palestinian. I will happily give him my money and invest in ethical platforms. Replit's a really good option for AI coding anyway!

personally, I hate the AI pivot. could barely find a way to make a project without the vibecoding option, recently

Pivoting to AI made Repl.it worse but Warp.dev better.

I took it for a spin spin to build a simple task manager. It worked for 45 minutes, built half the solution and then asked me for money. Compared to the other options in this space, it seems like an expensive solution.

What other options?

An entry level programming book? Building a basic task manager is a pretty straight forward task, it doesn't take much coding knowledge to do and is one that is often used as an example to teach programming.

I tried their pro version then cancelled after realizing it’s worse than Claude Code

When I hear Replit, I remember how the CEO tried to kill an intern's pet project.

https://intuitiveexplanations.com/tech/replit/

I am surprised the CEO does not understand the dynamic of his business. An open source project replicating your product is always a boost to the business. There is no case where that's not the case. The OSS is essentially the minatenance free free tier of the paid product.

I went to a YC event where the founder of a multi-billion dollar open source SaaS said pretty much the opposite and tried to drill home how strategic the choice needs to be for the company to survive.

This must be Gitlab?

Nah, their moat is making the software as fiddly and ops heavy as possible. I really like gitlab but having set it up myself several times now, it's kinda a mess and they're not incentivized to make it decent.

To play devil’s advocate - where do you draw the line? They say they’re not going to push further into competing, but what if they did? I don’t know enough about either platform to really comment on how much of a big it is / how much they crossover. I do feel that it shows somewhat bad judgement on behalf of the intern to build something in exactly the same space as a former employer. One of the great things about software is that you can always move into another domain with your skills.

Obviously, I love the likes of Tailscale for embracing and supporting this behaviour - but that’s super exceptional (because they’re a strong team).

Well the line is law: infringing copyrights and patents. And the US law is very specific about ideas not being copyrightable, so clones are usually safe.

Yeah that’s fair - and to be clear, I’m not really defending the CEO in this case. As a founder, I was just imagining a scenario where one of our team did something similar and how I might react to it. My thoughts (and point) drifted a bit.

Serves more as a reminder to the youngsters out there that potential future hirers will use things like this to inform hiring decisions. Legal or not, your history follows you around (I’m old enough to be lucky to not have the stupid stuff I did early in my career available online). Be free, go build stuff for fun but keep clear of your employers space.

There is no future for Replit considering how Anthropic, OpenAI and Google are moving into dev tools. And then there‘s Cursor and the likes.

As an online IDE they would have had a chance. But when they pivoted into AI, they decided to enter a highly crowded place with very strong players.

Recently OpenAI and now Anthropic are developing mobile clients as well:

https://www.testingcatalog.com/anthropic-prepares-claude-cod...

They were failing as an online IDE for several years then growth shot up after the AI pivot.

Cursor is in the same lifeboat being circled by sharks as Replit. What value does teaching noobs how to code or showing changes in an IDE have when the AI is smarter than humans and human in the loop just slows things down and makes them worse?

Too much money for a business that really won't find a way to justify the investment. Could have been a terrific lifestyle business and become extremely successful.

They are working at a too competitive area. Techs changed, and everything should re-start from scratch. Nine years may mean nothing at all.

I don't understand the appeal of Replit. Claude and other agents do what they do for much cheaper and efficiently. Is it for newcomers who don't know anything about software development, nd Replit fills the gap with basic user instructions and structure? Why is it even a thing while real agents are there?

Replit's original value proposition was on-demand sandboxed environments.

With Claude, it's like you're handing YOUR laptop's terminal to an intern. With Replit, you can mess things up without consequences, which is a great help for newbies.

WSL + local Git? Don't people use it to sandbox their applications and create necessary branches without losing their minds?

I've seen bots promoting Replit on Steam forums of indie games.

If this is the way they are marketing their product, I don't see it as having a future. What I've seen in the Dwarf Fortress forums alone makes me want to avoid the company with a 10' pole.

Let us not forget how replit tried to cancel Riju (an open source project from one of the early devs which does something similar)

Edit: looks like they succeeded or the author moved on

https://radian.statuspage.io/

It's still up, it only supports IPv6 so that may be why you can't get to it.

Hey, Replit employee here. I'm pretty sure this isn't us (definitely isn't our marketing team's MO AFAIK). Can you email me some examples at james @ replit dot com so I can look into this?

I find exactly one post about Replit in the DF Steam forums and it's definitely not from a bot account. Players who have just discovered vibe coding love to tell devs "just" to use something like they've been enlightened.

I found two, but it looks like the topic was deleted. Kagi had it partially cached as a search result[0]. The first thread in that list seems a bit more ...pushy than the second thread. Though I think you're still right - was probably just a new coder who was excited about what they found.

[0]: https://files.catbox.moe/oepmri.png

> […] unlike many AI-powered coding companies, Replit is gross margin positive.

Well, that’s highly unusual. I recon it is because replit covers the whole production pipeline, from specification to implementation to deployment?

What, college students with credits who haven't figured out docker yet?

"Replit found its market"

HN: It sucks now

maybe HN isn't the market then :p

probably not for many founders sharing their product on HN

neither is reddit

At the risk of stating the obvious, is it really that surprising people who frequent “hacker” forum don’t appreciate a product pivot pitched specifically to non-coders?

>Rather than becoming defensive, Masad and his team owned the problem. In fact, says Masad, within two days, they rolled out an automatic safety system that separates a user’s “practice” database from their “real” one. The way Masad describes it, it’s a little like having two versions of a website’s filing cabinet — the AI agent can experiment freely in a development database, but the production database, which is the real thing that users interact with, is completely walled off.

I gotta wonder who the median techcrunch reader is if the writer/editor felt it necessary to explain the point of having a staging and prod environment, and with such a pointless analogy. We surely cannot understand what a database is unless we're told it's like a filing cabinet, right?

You don't write for your median reader, you write for the vast majority of your readers.

That's a basic concept of writing. Journalism should be accessible, so even if you know what a database is and how to deploy it in different envs, you shouldn't write assuming that. If a large portion of your readers don't know what you're saying, you've failed as a writer. If your readership includes high school students, you write with that as the baseline.

Richard Feynman certainly didn't write as if he assumed the reader knew particle physics. Be like Richard Feynman.

Richard Feynman didn’t use poor analogies.

'Poor' is subjective. Some might even use it to describe your comment.

Chuck Norris doesn't even NEED analogies. He explains the original problem so hard that you understand it without reference to a similar but more familiar situation.

Chuck Norris would probably have mentioned "dev" and "production" and never needed to discuss furniture used for stacking open-faced envelopes for holding papers.

Chuck Norris doesn’t use AI, AI uses Chuck Norris.

If the median has half the users over it and half under it, wouldn’t writing for most of your readers be very close to writing for the median? If we are aiming for 51% (most readers). Most readers is somewhere between 50% and under 100%.

I appreciate the idea, but I think there are always assumptions. Like you did not explain what the median is because this is hn. I like the standars of the economist, always saying what an acronym is on first usage, and what a company is (Google, a search company). What they dont do is say: Google, like a box where you enter what you want to find and points you to other boxes. That would be condescending for its readers I believe. It is a matter of taste, and not objective, I guess.

That would be writing for most users but barely. I think there’s a fair reason they said “vast majority” instead.

I don’t think “vast majority” has a rigid definition, but I’d put it closer to 95% than 51%.

For example, in the senate passing with 51 votes is a “simple majority”.

I am not sure the post said "vast majority" originally, to be fair. Is there a way to check?

This is all highly personal, so just banter'ing, but:

I agree there's no clear definition but 95% is even beyond "overwhelming majority" to me (with overwhelming being greater than vast). I'd call that "near totality".

Maybe, at least for US contexts, "vast" should line up with "filibuster-proof"? Eg 60-65%? 75% at most.

Of course, then that doesn't tell me anything about what it should mean in other contexts.

I think you're unaware of how vast vast is!

Personally, I feel vast is used to refer to things that 'appear limitless' e.g. vast desert, or when describing easily bound things - like percentages - to be almost complete.

Looking around it seems there is some debate on this, but it tends to end up suggesting the higher numbers:

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/vast_majority - puts vast as 75-99%

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39222264 - puts vast as greater than 75% (I can't tell if the top comment is a joke or there really is some form of ANSI guidance on this).

But to find a more compelling source I've taken a look at the UK's Office for National Statistic's use of the term. While they don't seem to have guidance in their service manual (https://service-manual.ons.gov.uk/) a quick term limited search of actual ONS publications show:

* https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsde...

- "The vast majority (99.1%) of married couples were of the opposite sex"

- "In this bulletin, we cover families living in households, which covers the vast majority of families. " - this is high 90's by a quick google elsewhere.

* https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/housing/...

- "The vast majority of households across England and Wales reported that they had central heating in 2021 (98.5%, 24.4 million)."

* https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsde...

- "The vast majority (93.0%) lived in care homes."

This seems to put vast in the 90%+ category. There is certainly more analysis that can be done here though, as I have only sampled and haven't looked at the vast majority of publications.

(this was fun, I don't mean to come over as pedantic)

I think your username checks out. :D

Apparently I underestimated vastness.

Write for your median reader, and the bottom half will stop reading you. Problem solved.

I'm not sure if any of my coworkers has ever properly used a filing cabinet

Spreadsheet would have been the better analogy.

Which wouldn't be an analogy, because spreadsheet programs can be considered and often are a database.

> Be like Richard Feynman

Oh the things he did to filing cabinets, especially "secure" ones...

Ironically, especially when you combine it with the em-dash, it really sounds like exactly the type of completely pointless and unilluminating analogy that LLMs love to generate. These analogies are essentially a bridge between two concepts, much like how a physical bridge connects two pieces of land separated by water, except in this case the 'water' is understanding and the bridge doesn't actually help you cross it.

Well done

To be fair, this was an indirect quote from a founder trying to make programming accessible to "white-collar employees with no technical background".

The bigger question here is why prod/staging wasn't an obvious design choice in the first place!

Maybe it diverted too many resources from the original goal. They fixed the issue afterwards and made a fuss about it.

> median techcrunch reader

Is probably a consumer tech enthusiast and not a software developer.

They are merely quoting the analogy from Masad — for whom it makes sense if they are targeting nontechnical users and not professional developers anymore.

It's kind of a beautiful turn of phrase, in that the filing cabinet is entirely superfluous, you can use almost any noun. "it’s a little like having two versions of a website’s sub sandwich — the AI agent can experiment freely with a development sandwich, but the production sandwich, which is the real thing that users interact with, is completely walled off".

"When you click a button on our website, a request is sent across the internet to our servers, it's a little like if a sockeye salmon was sent across the internet to our servers."

> Masad and his team owned the problem. he fired half of his team so it really wasn't an option for rest of them team.

Let's not forget this gem here [1].

Tells you everything you need to know about the company and its leadership.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27424195

He threatened the ex-intern by saying they have "a lot of money to pay for top lawyers" (goodness!), the incident gathered a lot of attention, got caught, and was forced to say sorry.

Replit is in the news because of the Vercel fiasco. And it's jarring because of how they've tried to take advantage of that situation.

Vercel fiasco?

The CEO thought it a good idea to take a beaming selfie with Netenyahu and then post it to X

Got it. I was going to say it sounds like less than a fiasco but I see this is in context of someone criticizing the Replit CEO for a specific action so now I get it. Apologies for being dense. It's a reminder that people leading companies are just people. And if we have a purity test on everyone we better be prepared to have a purity test on ourselves. And not just in our own eyes but in the eyes of everyone else. And that's where it quickly falls apart.

Sad to see https://riju.codes offline. Cant resolve DNS.

Last push to main was 2 months ago so there's hope: https://github.com/radian-software/riju

Seeing it as offline could be related to this:

”Please note that Riju is only available on IPv6-enabled networks due to the higher financial cost of supporting legacy protocols.”

Definitely that, I read this on a mobile 5G connection and was able to access it just fine

Can confirm. It's up for me on mobile too.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com