Vices Are the New Virtues | Amjad Masad on AI, Athletes, and Vibe Coding

All right. What's up everybody? We're back. Uh, welcome back from our commercial break. You see Gazi has transformed into a hot over here. — Same haircut. — All right. — I don't know. I'm working on it. It's getting a little thin up here. [gasps] What's up everyone? Uh, so we were just chatting with Gazi. Now we got AMD up here. He's making a little post on X. He's getting on his phone here. Hyp up a little bit. And uh, did you just get off stage? Are you going on stage? — I did. I did. Uh, it was a very cool format. It's sort of like a talk show host format. He had this desk in front of him and his iPad and computer and he was going through the stack that runs Saster. So for people

who don't know — the entire SAS experience not only the website the back end the database but also the marketing the sales like the sponsors all of that is run on replet either through replet apps or replet agents or agents on top of replet [snorts] — and it it's fascinating. So he was running this conference. He's been running it since 2015. — He used to need like 20 people, 20 plus people, a bunch of contractors, bunch of, you know, um, agencies and things like that to build a website and and all of that. And now it's just two people, him and Amelia. — Yep. — And a bunch of a couple of AI agents. M — uh and they're doing this interesting thing where they want to hire the first person in a long time and their idea is that person reports to the agent. — Oh wow. — I don't know how I feel about that. We'll see how it plays out. — But he's like, you know, I ask our marketing agent, it's called 10x 10 um it's 10x 10k. And he's like, I ask it every day. What should I do today? and he's like, "It's giving me it's a better manager of me, the CEO of the firm, — uh, than I manage myself. " — That's crazy. — And so, so then he had the idea of like, why don't we hire someone to help it, the things that it struggles with. — And so, it's really, uh, Jason and Sasher, they're living in the future. — This is, I think, the first semi-autonomous event. — A lot of the decisions that were made here were made by agents running up. — Yeah. A lot of the people are here because they were sold and marketed to by an agent. A lot of the sponsors, the entire sales cycle with those sponsors happened on an agent I think called QB. And it's so we went through this entire stack and he got my views on it and at the end I was like, "Dude, you're living more in the future than I am. " — Yeah.

— Can you talk a little bit about his background, too? I feel like Jason went all in on Reply like maybe 6 months ago. And it's important to note that he doesn't have a software engineering background, Amelia either. I think there's just like entrepreneurs that know what they want and know how to talk to — Asian. He's an entrepreneur. He's a VC as well. He's very successful VC and he um you know he's a community builder as well, but I don't think he's written a line of code in his life. I might be wrong about exactly that, but I know for a fact that he's not like a coder, professional software engineer. And um he started using Replet I think around agent 2 — and man things that were so different back then. It was like I think almost a year ago when he started uh I want to say like April March 2025 and um the agent was was kind of primitive. I mean relative to where it is right now with um with autonomy with parallel agents but also the platform um wasn't as mature. I mean we mature the platform night and day. The platform is a lot more scalable a lot more secure um a lot more reliable like deployments uh fail go down way less. The uptime on Replet is amazing. Like the uptime of replet apps hosted on replet is better than replet. com. we should maybe host replet. com on on replet which is something we want to do at some point. But um so I think when he first came on he struggled a little bit like a lot of people I think in 2025 started using agents. it required a lot more grit and a lot more technical knowledge um just perseverance to get things and he has that perfect pers I think a lot of people — actually from that era there's a lot of people that kind of tried these products and you talk to them today it's like ah they don't work you know put in a random prompt and very vague prompt and it didn't give me what I want and I just left and but he persevered and he ran into some issues and he overcome overcome And I think by October 2025 around agent 3, the kind of things Jason was doing with replet was far more advanced than any software engineer was doing with agents. — Wow. — The thing that surprised me about the hype that started around December 2025, especially with software engineers, is that I was like confused because our users are already doing exactly all of that. It's like software engineer was like, "Oh, you don't have to type code anymore. " It's like, "Well, our users have been doing it for at least three, four months now. " And so, uh, I think Jason through his persistence was able to become a

vibe quarter paralons. — How does it feel to be a little bit at the head of the market in that regard? Because it seems like that happens a lot, right? Like I see people getting hyped up about announcements that come out and I like, "Hey, we've been doing that in reply for like six months or whatever. " like how does it feel to kind of be making decisions that are leading the market and how do you kind of go into those decision-m processes as you guide a company like this that's growing so fast? — Yeah, I mean look in some sense we are much bigger company now. We have this like large valuation, large uh revenue and run rate. We're closing on 300 people. Um but in many ways relative to our peers we're way less capitalized. We're way less hyped. We're not on TV and on the New York Times every other day. And so we're punching way above our weight when it comes to innovation. And you know, I can tell you for a fact

every time we release a new agent, I hear from my friends at these big labs, they all huddle around the computer and like look at what we're doing. And when we release especially agent one, we've gotten reached out from from AI researchers that told us I wasn't aware that LLMs are capable of this. So it feels really good to be able to kind of lead the way and show people what's um what's possible. It often times feels a little frustrating because you're sort of at the edge of what's possible. technology break in all sorts of interesting ways, but also when people finally catch up and it's like, you know, we're already doing this. Like, you're just not paying attention. — So, but it's great and I I think as a company, as a culture, we pride ourselves on being first on so many things. Replet was kind of the first online IDE, the first IDE that bundled together deployments um in database and all of that. There's so many firsts even like a simple things like um every IDE had a save button. Replet was the first ID to not have to do autosave, right? So like there's a lot of things where you know one of our values at Replet is uh we're famous for the seek pain value but there's another one less famous is called um think radical and the idea is at any given point in time there are conventional wisdom that is outdated that you can actually rethink. Now, often times conventional wisdom is is right, I think, 99% of the time. But if

you're able to find that 1% of the time where something is no longer serving a purpose and you were able to rethink it, that's how you're a you can build u great businesses that grow fast. — It took me months to get used to the whole autosave thing like and replet. I have to continue I keep doing like command s and give me something. I was like, oh that's right, replet auto automatically saves everything for me. I don't have to do that anymore. Yes. um as you're talking to power users like um like Jason um like how does that change your view of the replet experience like he's living in the future as you mentioned like how is that like impacting like how you're thinking about the road map for for the product — you know I the main thing uh when I was on stage kind of listening to him talk about all these things that he's building is like we got to help more people get to his level — and I think the things you guys are doing and the things uh that um the rest of marketing devell uh folks do with educating people is very important but I think there's more to do in the product to guide people um we've had a couple of like false starts to help people build agents we have this like automations product that I you know I'm not I don't feel very proud about but we tried a few times I think the next big thing we need to build is really in on rails way. We need to do what we did to apps. to agents what we did to apps. Before rap making apps was incredibly difficult. Uh now making agents is incredibly difficult. — So we need to figure out how to make making agents fun, reliable, testable, deployable and scalable — and easy to build. — You have your context all in one place and like this the this artifact is an agent rather than an application. — That's right. Right. And I think that's the future of software. — Well, and we're getting really close. I mean, we've got parallel agents kind of running and that's like a major like I love being tied up with the main agent and I think of something else, I'm like, start a new task, send it off in the back. And then we have the little like feedback button in the bottom which sends the stuff into the agent that you can kind of feed. So, we're not that far from like self-improving tools and kind of the agent taking the next step. — The main thing is to uh platformize this if that's a word. But like all the stuff we did for replet agent, I think we're one of the best companies in the world at building agents. And so can we take that knowledge and make it into a platform. M — so can you can we provide the same platform we use internally to build rapid agent for people to build a marketing agent a sales agent because all these agents have the same architecture ultimately and so creating a platform to support different types of agents and then them inheriting parallel agents compaction contacts you know all the stuff we do skills so um yeah we just got to make it make easy and we're embarking we're now doing like this big rewrite to create to make what we built into a platform that others can leverage. Interesting.

— There's a big step change that's happening for companies. They're going to have to rethink their offering in their services. I guess I'm wondering what advice would you have for those companies as they're adopting to new AI landscape like agents doing more work but also changing their value proposition like what opportunities what pitfalls do you see for founders? I think a founder today needs to be an athlete. Needs to be. And when I say an athlete, like um if you think about — push-ups, — definitely push-ups. — Inside, sorry. Build a thought joke. Somebody built an app that like uh scanned your body and to test it. Uh we put the app up and then I did push-ups on the stream and it like mapped, you know, and did the — He got up to five. Wow. — Which was great. I mean, I'm sure a lot of people will take this literally go fitness apps. That's not what I'm saying. Um, when you think about athletes like I don't know Michael Phillips or chess, think about Magnus Carlson. Magnus Carlson needs to be on his aame every day, like every day. You can't you slip up and you lose against Hans Nean and you accuse him of cheating. All this chess drama, but um you have to be ready all the time. And I think entrepreneurs and people working at at startups need to uh the main thing they understand is that you can't skip a beat. — You need to be on top of what's happening in the AI world. You need to be in touch with the research — with the um with the latest capabilities with you know what's possible. You need to be constantly building and uh and you need to constantly reinvent

your product. And one thing that is important I talked about on stage is the sun cost fallacy. You know this idea of like oh I already you know put so much effort into this you know you might as well invest a little bit more into it which is why people like don't pivot at the right time or they don't change the product in the right way. And it's important to totally cure yourself of some cost fallacy. I think it is one of the main killers of companies today where they're like, "Oh, we've invested so much in this platform. " Well, this platform is outdated now. Like, you got to renew it. And so, we try really hard at Rufflet to be very okay with starting fresh. — Yeah. And it's not even about just being the athlete. They obviously have to be ready too, but creators or vibe coders or people who want to kind of innovate in the space also have to be marketers. We talk about this all the time. They have to be media specialists. They have to like be monitoring the industry. Like I work in the space and like I feel like all I do is try to keep up with this industry and I can't keep up, you know? So like what else do people have to think about as if they want to be competitive in the space? obviously not building at replet scale, but most of the people who are watching here are trying to build their freelance business or build an agency or get a product off the ground and like, you know, what are you seeing from, you know, to be on the cutting edge to get to the next level as a creator using a tool like Replet? What do you see as that kind of marquee skill set or an advantage you might, you know, tell somebody to focus on?

— You know, I I phrased it on this podcast with uh Jack Neil in an interesting way that that went uh viral. A lot of people are upset about it, but I'll say it again. Um, I think there are things that used to be vices that are now virtues. — One of [clears throat] them is being lazy. — And what I mean by that, — that — that is I think lazy people are good automators because they're like allergic. I am allergic to repetitive tasks. — Like here's a replet app. Every time anybody asks me to do anything even remotely repetitive, I'm like, "Replet agent, can you solve this for me? " — We have a chat scraper right now that's looking through all the comments and that came about because I asked Rhymar once to like get the comments from YouTube after the show. — This is a replet built [clears throat] out. — So, he built out a Chrome extension that scrapes automatically. Now, we have all of our comments here. — What's crazy is now we have a whole live and we can't show this. I wish we could, but this is the comments. We're building like a whole tool to start interacting with folks. Uh the agent will start scrubbing for questions and um yeah, building a queue. So like and this is tied into the reream infrastructure too. So like the tooling that we're building. One of the things I'm so excited about is the stuff that we're actually building here in the community using Replet. And I think we're slowly starting to kind of reveal some of that to the community and people are going to start to see like oh this is really cool. Obviously this buildathon platform that we just did. We just did the 24-hour buildathon and we did that on you know replet like we build that stack on replet and it was kind of cool to see because there was a point where the app crashed because like the traffic for the buildathon was like so big. We had to have engineering come in and like crank up the servers and then you know like we had to do some like real-time optimizations but within 15 minutes of like this spike that we got you know everything was leveled and balanced. We published and everything was great. Shout out to Tanner in the audience if you're watching. Um but I don't think any other company would have trusted their own stack to do something at that scale. You know talk about the confidence that we have as a company letting people build that type of application on a tool like ours and hit that type of traffic and like just confidently know like hey we're doing this. We're not going to go to some, you know, hackathon specific, you know, post like most of the other competitors are doing. — Mhm. Yeah. I mean, you got to you got to be you got, you know, you got to be, I guess, honest or you got to be not hypocritical and you have to they call dog fooding. I don't like that term, right? Uh I think it is steak. Uh it's not dog food. — Drinking our own champagne. I've heard — Dr. Champagne. It's only champagne if it comes from France, right? From the little pocket sign. I don't know.

— Yeah, we can take that. — I'm really proud of the kind of rapid deployment platform, hosting platform. The other day we had um what's called the most viral petition in history. It's uh the Mbappe out. app. It is um a petition that someone in Spain did around uh kicking the football player Mbappe. I don't have any of this. I don't want to get into football drama or soccer drama. Um, but um, it got like something like 60 million visitors in a day — and it was it had a database and you kind of signed the petition and it had a lot of traffic and it didn't miss a heartbeat. — Y — and these things are going viral on Replet and like our engineers don't even pay attention because it's just like — there's so much going on the platform. We have so much traffic. we're surfing like you know billions trillions of traffic and so um and so if if our users are trusting us with that sort of level of scale we need to also do it and um and I think it's been going really great I think whenever we build apps on replet those tend to be very easier to change a lot easier than going through like a more legacy infrastructure um and it just makes the entire organization a lot faster and there's an aspect of that it is sort of like I said self-improving. You can have self-improving software, organizations. And if everyone at the organization is using software and using agents — to automate their work, you know, the company will move faster over time. I mean, the conventional wisdom in business history, Silicon Valley for sure, is that companies slow down as they grow. I think we keep g we keep going faster. I mean, I can't keep up with our launches, honestly. — You're not the only one. — I know. I cover them every week on Friday for recap. I'm like we launched what? Like every two was like another big week in replet. It got redundant because every week's a big week. — Um you spoke earlier about founders need to be a world class athlete to keep up. And then we're also — I did I said two contradicted thing. I said you have to be an athlete and lazy, right? — A lazy athlete — or like an efficient athlete. — But we're also seeing like folks change up their organization to keep pace with that as well. Coinbase had an announcement. Blocks had an announcement

around flattening the organization and thinking about leaner teams that are superpowered by AI. And I think in the Coinbase instance, they even mentioned a oneperson team powered by AI. So, can you talk a little bit about like getting the teams equipped and ready to go fast as well? — I I honestly don't know how much of these companies are AI washing their layoffs. like they're already pretty inefficient and then but I mean there's probably some truth to it. Um I think for sure like one obvious uh prediction of the future is that um individuals are going to be superpowered right like there you don't need large teams you um Jeff bases is known for the like the pizza rule like any given team needs to be able to share like one pizza — one pizza yeah the one pizza team — yeah and so anything larger than that and then the team is like kind of bloated and kind of slows down and and maybe Now we go down to the like, you know, instead of a pizza like the chicken tenders team, — the one slice team, team. — Um, but uh, you know, it's obvious that the small I mean there's a level of which it kind of makes sense. I think maybe one person might be a little too much, but uh, the the, you know, I think smaller teams can move faster. always recognized that at Replet and um we we've always had projects where it's like a single person kind of driving the project. this concept of a DRRi directly responsible individual initially sort of innovated by Apple of course Apple it's very large probably very bureaucratic now but um but initially like when you hear Steve Jobs and early Apple people talk about it the idea is that um bureaucracy and things done by committee is almost always worse and you know that's why governments tend to be very slow and all of that and so you'd want companies to be almost you know the opposite of what a government is run like you know and so the leaner the better and now with AI

people the management structure so uh org charts kind of uh used to serve a lot of different purposes used to serve the purpose of you know the basic purpose of like people managing it used to serve information flow so you have the CEO and management team kind you know saying something and they get that filters through the organization. I don't think information flow is the best use of the org chart. I think um you know companies should have these data agents, these AI agents, these that you know companies should be as transparent as possible. You know we have a rule on Slack that as much as possible like post in public channels. also it can get overwhelming but now AI agents can like even the Slack AI can like summarize what's happening in the Slack organization so information is more accessible and so the org chart serves less purpose now um and so I think what's left for the reporting structure serve is like more like people management coaching you know that sort of thing and that I think is more human essence uh aspect of the reporting structure but You can have managers that have, you know, traditionally I think managers will have five, six, seven people. Uh, and now I think Coinbase in the in their blog post talked about like, uh, 12 per manager. — I think you can get up to 20. — Depends on the team, but you can

probably get up to 20. — And I'm curious, I'm judge, I wanted to circle back, you're talking about in, you know, the efficiencies of a great team and and, you know, individual users that are doing great things. Um, you talked a little bit about, you know, the lazy athlete. So, I'd love to hear a little bit more about what is that, you know, what does that really entail and uh, you know, how some of the vices are becoming virtues. And I think I got a lot of questions about that from some of our younger community members who were actually excited to hear your, you know, insights on that. — Yeah. I mean, the other one that I talked about uh the kind of like mimi way of talking about it is like being uh terminally online and brain rotted as is an advantage. And what I mean by that is if you're in touch with what's happening in the culture, you're likely to find ideas that could grow really quickly. I mean, the obvious thing if you're in touch of what's happening in AI, you might be able to detect what's possible with AI, you know, very quickly and be able to build a business quickly. You can also just see what people are interested in. It could be social media trends. Um, you know, it could be, you know, certain products people are interested in, certain things people are doing. Like I remember when I was on that podcast, um, uh, Jack's podcast, he talked about the looks, maxing culture, right? Like if you're at the edge of culture, you could potentially like build an app that goes viral because that's the meta. That's what's So if you want to be a serial entrepreneur, an entrepreneur that's like building apps and launching them quickly, you know, being in touch with the with what's happening in the wider culture is incredibly important. Now that doesn't mean you should do be doing scrolling all the time. Maybe you should be using AI agents and like building AI agents to kind of monitor theu situation, you know.

— Um — I think I mean working with Replet has replaced a lot of doom scrolling for me. like a lot of time that I used to just spend like I'm — I don't want to say addicted but it might be the word uh we joke about this all the time on X is like the amount of time I spend just kind of thinking through creative processes and kind of working with the tool now and it seems like a it's scratching a lot of the same itch especially for creators as you unlock this superpower right like if you've been hitting your head against like this technical ceiling for so long and you have these ideas that kind of just — like you just take over you and now you can get those out into the world it's hard for me to peel myself away from that. You know, it's like I think that's some of the termly online and some of the it resonates with folks because I think you could be playing video games, you could be doom scrolling, but instead you're doing this productive thing and you're building cool things. Maybe you're creating some revenue opportunities, you're upskilling, etc. And it's just such it's a more productive use of the same dopamine trigger, I think. — Exactly. And I think the last one is um one thing that's always seen as a as a flaw is like being um sort of ADHD. Yeah. — Uh, and like I think I'm naturally sort of ADHD and um I think right now I think multitasking actually never worked. It's true. I think multitasking kind of works now — because you have all these agents running in parallel. You can go to rap play. You can have, you know, 20 different threads. If you're someone whose like brain kind of works like that and you're constantly like kind of seeking novelty and going to the next thing, it is actually kind of a superpower. If you're able to like manage a lot of context in your head and jump from one task to another, I think that's a that's largely a good thing. I think every once in a while you still have to sit down and focus on one thing and have like one thread where you're thinking really deeply about it. One thing I've

been using more as a tool recently is the raplet slides. Uh I think slides is like a neat communication tool but also neat thinking tool. So I sit down with reflet agent and we go back and forth on like building some kind of vision doc or some kind of doc that helps me think about things and oftentimes I'll ask you to make it into slides. — Yeah. — And I I'll share it with the team. Uh and that's been u incredibly useful. So I think the kind of meta lesson that I I'm trying to kind of provide here is a lot of conventional wisdom about how people should act, how people should behave is

outdated, right? Um uh I think what matters now more than anything is being extremely adaptable, being very adaptable, uh being very good learner. Um and uh and be being very good uh with the tools and and everything that we talked about, you know, being able to change things quickly, not being tied to some cost fallacy and all these different things. So, you know, I think the advice, you know, parents and teachers, whatever are giving are giving, you know, young people might not be the best right now. And I encourage people to kind of think deeply, try to think for first principles about the future, what's going to be possible because the world is changing, I think, at a pace that we haven't seen since the industrial revolution. — Well, because the landscape is changing. We had um some of the one of the winners from the content challenge on the show like a month ago and they blew my mind. You know, they were online all the all the time. They're marketers and they were just slinging different angles to see what hit with their audience and when they found a painoint or an angle that got some traction then they built the Replet app and shipped it to all those folks in the comments. — Love it. — So like that's like you know you have now social media where you can go viral like you could just like quickly find out what people care about. — That inversion is very interesting. It blew my mind and I asked him like, "Hey, like would you put together a waiting list and send them there? " Like, "No, no, no. Just ship something, even if it's 60%, if you're locked in on the story, on the pain point, people will go and sign up and now you have paying customers rather than people on the wait list. " It was crazy. That's awesome.

— Well, we're seeing so many people kind of make their first sale after the buildathon. That gets us really excited as we see this. — I just saw a guy come up to me. I was like, I made my first dollar ever using Rep. — That's it. I mean, that's the piece that excites me. It's like, yeah, everyone's building now. So we shift a lot of focus to — hey like can you actually you know drive things forward can you take things to market um okay so we got a time — we got time check over here thank you so much for joining us appreciate it so Thanks guy.