Making Replit today + predicting future Replit

Originally published on 1/29/23, but republished again with updates + new ideas. Holy heck their team ships fast.

• as time passes, technology becomes easier to make
• scale is easy
• innovator’s dilemma
• problems that replit solves
  • UI (easy)
  • code editor/language servers in browser (but it’s kinda slow)
  • networking, anycast (hard)
  • fast booting containers (hard)
  • persistent containers (hard)
  • package management (medium)
  • collaborative text editing (hard)
  • mobile (medium)
  • databases (easy)
  • gpus (hard)
  • copilot/AI integration (medium)
• things I didn’t anticipate
  • AI primitives (openai api built into every repl environment (but it’s google))
• why is replit easier to create today (some reasons are due to open source projects that owe their success from replit)
  • containers/networking/multi-region scale is trivial thanks to fly machines
    • ok, so replit has released code-exec and agent-env, which may turn out to be a better version of fly machines
    • so technically replit itself provides a primitive to make it easier to build “replit”… which isn’t that useful if you’re trying to compete lol
  • nix
  • yjs
    • cloudflare durable objects
    • partykit
    • liveblocks yjs
  • codemirror 6
  • neon
  • openai
• a better replit (problems that replit still hasn’t solved)
  • vercel grade CI/CD
  • more disk storage
  • multi-region scale
  • autoscale
  • vscode parity
  • dev/staging/prod environments
    • build step (node frameworks) (typescript) deployments!
    • a databases for each branch (planetscale/neondb/d1) technically not for each branch yet, but yknow
  • framework integration
    • nextjs
    • build output api
  • primitives beyond cpu/memory/ram
    • s3 blob storage
    • cron jobs
    • pub/sub
    • message queues
    • see language runtimes
    • gpus (not fully released yet…)
  • cdn
    • cloudflare, fastly
    • image optimization
    • edge
  • see next-gen IDEs
  • vercel v0
    • imagine this but mobile
  • app store
    • currently, online app store exists
    • but with eu regulation apple and google might have to allow third party iOS app stores…
    • and guess who is primed to take advantage of that?!?
    • could start with mobile apps, but edge more into native from there…
      • oh hullo expo! 😏