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He told me that he believes that the leverage on programming skills has gone way up in the last year. He thinks that the current generation of AI tools are inherently augmenting tools, not automating tools. They might change the bundle of skills you need to be a programmer—you might act more like a guide or a manager in many instances than writing code yourself.  But he believes that programming skills actually become more important in an AI-driven world. So yes, he still wants his kids to learn to code.

I wanted to make hacking easy, so you can have an idea and build it fast, instead of needing to plan a lot and set up a big development environment. It's been my obsession over my career to just make programming more fun and accessible.

Another way to say this is that these models are really good as copilots. And I think that will create deflationary pressure in the environment where individual companies may need fewer programmers. So it will have a significant impact on productivity from that perspective.

People were way undershooting on the potential of AI for a long time, and now they’re way overshooting. There’s a bipolar nature to markets like this. It’s something you have to come to terms with if you want to build companies.

The inherent benefit of Replit is that we bundle and vertically integrate the entire toolchain and lifecycle of software development. We help our users go from idea, to an end product that you can see and share with friends, to a deployment that you can share with the world. We’re even building in tools to help developers monetize what they build.

So vertical integration becomes a superpower for us. It’s technically possible for Microsoft to build that, but it’s extremely hard because their customers aren’t specifically asking for that. They’re not asking for bundling and vertical integration, most of them want less bundling and more customization.

The vertical integration of the car, the AI, and the physical power station created this incredible experience. It allows Tesla to suck at a lot of things – like build quality issues – but because they can provide an unparalleled end-to-end experience they win.

This type of bundling and vertical integration is something I’d recommend startups who want to build in AI think about as a strategy. It takes a certain type of founder who is very focused and able to do it for a really long time in order to build something like this.

It’s super hard. It will nearly kill you. And you can’t go for the vertical integration and bundling right out of the gate. There were a lot of startups founded around the time of Replit that tried to do this, and they all died. A few of them raised big seed rounds, and burned through it for five years, and closed the company.

You can’t get too ambitious too fast. What we did is we built a toy version of the complete thing.

Building a toy is helpful because it allows you to ship. You create progress for people like investors or talent to see, and it allows you to tell if you’re building something people find useful. Whereas if you’re hiding in a corner somewhere, even if you have infinite capital, it’s really hard to have the willpower to keep going.

This stuff is important, but I don’t think founders should over-strategize. Just build something useful and get it into the hands of people. You want to think strategically, but don’t do it so early on that the magnitude of the challenge depresses you.

These bridges are actually just an intermediate step. Since Matrix itself is an amazing chat network, eventually as more people start using bridges on Matrix, they’ll notice that their friends are already on Matrix, eliminating the need for bridges gradually over time.

Our goal is to make Beeper the best chat client for ambi-social people. Beeper (client) is to Matrix (protocol) as Gmail is to email. Interested?

We can look to the case of Siegfried Sassoon and ponder whether this is the case or not for poetry, but I think it's mostly true in software. You can’t worry about the big picture and ask intelligent questions about the direction of the product if you’re busy arguing about which database or alerting system to use.

My friend Andrew wears the same brand of black shirt every day. He thinks that if he conserves the brainpower it would take to pick something to wear, he’ll bank it and be able to use it later for something else.I don’t know if this makes sense for fashion or what have you, but I really think there is something to this

Now I don’t know the extent to which we should take tech company missions seriously. I am beginning to suspect that we should not take them seriously at all. But let’s be naive for a minute, and consider the implications that would result if they really wanted to do this.

This is not an accident. It’s an inevitability. Not all Bad tech companies are successful, but almost all successful tech companies are Bad.

You can’t know in advance whether your path leads to success. If you could, successful paths would become overcompetitive and change the maze. There is an idea observer effect.

Since you can’t know up front which path will lead to success, without competition, you should simply pick the least risky path. If no-one else is navigating the maze, take as long as you need. Just don’t die.But competition changes the maze.

A competitor taking a faster, riskier path can turn your safer path into a literal dead end. A definitely legal version of Airbnb might have worked, but the possibly illegal Airbnb took that path away.

Founders will forever accidentally build Theranos, Zenefits, and Naspter. Because, for founders, being Good doesn’t pay if it’s not on the Fastest Survivable Path.

"There's a saying in programming: make the easy things easy and the hard things possible," Pennarun said. "There's lots of products out there that make the hard things possible. But surprisingly, there's very few products that make the easy things easy."

That might be good advice for enterprise tech entrepreneurs: Tailscale has raised $150 million in funding since it was founded in 2019 and just hit the 100-employee milestone. The dirty secret of enterprise tech is that most companies don't need infrastructure that makes hard things possible to thrive on the internet; you are not Google.