The Exchanges

Q of bounce around. They're using cursor one week, and then cloud code the next week, and then they're bouncing to this one. Um, what are you seeing, and what do you think's happening, and do you think there's any, uh, any merit to that fear in the market, or on X right now, that maybe the AI revenues that we're seeing are not as sticky as previous SaaS installation cycles?

A It's certainly suspicious. Uh, I mean, it, anyone who tells you differently is sort of, and I was a little worried about our growth. Like, is it, is it going to go away? What's going on? Like, this is like a little too fast. Um, and I think, uh, you know, we really start focusing on the, on the metrics that really matter, which is the revenue quality retention, things that more advanced companies are thinking about, like net dollar retention. We actually have above hundred percent net dollar attention, even for our consumer plan, which is probably unheard of. But, um, uh, you know, I, I think that, uh, I think maybe ARR is becoming a bit of a vanity metric, like how fast you can grow the ARR. I think you want to make sure you're providing an awesome service and also make sure that people just want to stay on your platform. I think, especially on the VS Code Wars, the switching costs being so low, Is, is going to be a challenge for them. You can go from Copilot to Windsurf to Cursor in like five minutes. Same project. Quite like it's one click. You can open the project. And so they're going to have to find a way to differentiate. The great thing about Replit, we provide this really great convenience. And so if ain't broke, don't fix it. You deploy something on Replit and people, people really tend to stay.

AI assessment note: “It's certainly suspicious. Uh, I mean, it, anyone who tells you differently”

Q Well, we got to ask about the Vercel drama. We talked to Guillermo earlier this show. What's going on there? What's your take? Can you break it down for us?

A Well, you know, I, uh, someone asked me, um, do you, do you plan on supporting Next.js and Repl.it agents? I said, no, because, uh, we want to bet on something like Vite that is open, like community builds, uh, and the way Next.js has been trending is that it's optimized for Vercel. They disagree, but it is actually not a controversial statement in the larger community. There's a project called Open Next that makes it so that, you know, uh, Next.js is deployable on more platform. Matt, the CEO of Netlify, commented, uh, agreeing with me. The larger community feels like, you know, Next.js is Is perhaps more tied to Vercel than they would like to admit. And I think they overreacted to my comments and, and, and they, and they strized my, my comments. I think it would have been, uh, uh, less of a, a story if they, you know, they didn't overreact to it. And I look, uh, uh, Vercel is an amazing product. It's an amazing brand. They've done a great job managing a lot of open source projects, not just Next.js. And for me, water on their bridge. Like, you know, I, uh, You know, I, I think, you know, emotions get, get high on Twitter and you start calling and, you know, I wish them really the best.

AI assessment note: “the way Next.js has been trending is that it's optimized for Vercel.”

Q Can you tell me some stories about like success stories from Replit? Maybe like the, the, what's possible as a solo dev today? I mean, we're seeing Peter levels IO do crazy stuff, but what are you seeing from the, from the most, uh, successful Replit users?

A Let me start with the, with the business cases. Cause I think those are, are kind of really profound. Cause we've always had like micro entrepreneurs like make money and you know, it's certainly accelerated massively, but A hundred plus year old, year old company, uh, Sears. Um, I don't know about you. I didn't know they, they continued to exist, but they, they have this, um, uh, spinoff called Sears Home Services. About a year ago, uh, they hired a team to Like a more trendy, uh, sort of, uh, tech team to get them off of Cobalt, which is whatever a hundred year old program language. And they were able to do it very quickly. And then after they'd done that, you know, basically most, most companies as they're modernizing, they go adopt a bunch of SAS tools and no code tools and local tools and to become like a modern company. They actually skipped all of that and went to, went to AI and they're Operations team, which manages the other kind of field workers that go out and every day kind of do house repairs and all of that. Uh, they start, they started building AI tools. So one AI tool that they have is like the worker would, would go and would talk to the AI and it would optimize it at their route and would, you know, that made it so that they're making a lot more money. And now that team, everyone in that team started building AI tools. And so you have this ops theme that's hig…

AI assessment note: “they have this, um, spinoff called Sears Home Services.”

Q lot of people that are like, oh, I vibe coded and it didn't really work. And then Andre Karpathy is like, I vote by vibe coded it and it worked great. And I'm like, There's probably a little bit of a difference between when Andre Karpathy is vibe coding and when someone who's completely non-technical is vibe coding. Like, is there still value to learning to code in 20, 25?

A I, I, I think there, I think there is, but I mean, it depends, John, about what is your prediction about where AI is headed, right? Like if, you know, in the up case, like, you know, what Dario just said recently, all code will be AI generated. You know, I assume this optimization path we're on where agents are going to get better and better and better. You know, the answer would be different. The answer would be no, it would be a waste of time to, to learn, learn how to code. Um, but like, you know, you could have different predictions and I think different people will, will make different assumptions. I, I, I'm at this point, like sort of. Agent pilled, you know, I, I, the, the progress we're seeing with agent, we, we just, uh, are rolling out V to agent. I've never seen a sort of like an AB test as we're rolling out. I've never seen metrics in my entire life. I worked at Facebook, other places. We're moving metrics like crazy. Just be just by improving the agent, like a hundred percent, 500% on certain metrics and on success that users are having. And so, uh, I think where vibe coding goes wrong is when a beginner is using cursor, some other platform, great product, but they don't give them guardrails. Like, you know, there, there's the guy that lost six months of work on, on Reddit. There's the guy on Twitter that, uh, leaked his API keys. Like on the upload, we do get comm…

AI assessment note: “I think there is, but I mean, it depends, John, about what is your prediction”