About a year ago I started experimenting with AI. A year ago it was good at helping with my grammar and spell check, better than anything else ever. Then a while after that, when the image generation features came out, I started experimenting with creating Images to supplement flash fiction writing, that was fun and mind blowing at the time. So here we are just over a year later and I’m researching what AI tools have developed since. Tools that re useful to me – useful in the same way that the early stuff was with my writing and images.
I’ve no affiliation with Replit.
Enter Replit https://replit.com
I have a few ideas that have been on the shelf for a long time. One of these is linkue. Linkue is a real world hyperlink. I never did much wit linkue because the technical overhead weighed more than my interest in doing it. A few weeks ago my Linkue story came around as I spun the lazy suzan. If that sounds cryptic it’s a reference to the way I manage projects.
I had monitored the conversation around the progression of the code writing capabilities of AI, the appearance of the likes of devin.ai and the increases in competence from benchmarks. So I decided to check if any tools had emerge that bridged the gap. The gap in this case being the technical overhead of building an app. The service that surfaced was replit.Here’s my tweet after using it for the first time, you can see was pretty excited.
What’s different about Replit?
There’s plenty of difference in replit, depending on how sophisticated you need are, it has a lot of the stack covered as has been pointed out in many diagrams. However all of that aside the most exciting thing, for someone like me, was that – with a simple text chat interface like I’ve got used to I could build a functioning prototype. No setup, no config.
What really blew me away was that it delivered on that promise. I’m in the “I’ll believe it when I can use it” camp. I’ve many other stories to work on so if the tools aren’t there yet to reduce that technical overhead then stories like Linkue will probably get shelved again and I’ll move on.
The process.
I signed up for a 1 month paid version of Replit. i think it was around $30
Clicked on the AI Agent
This was my prompt: “A web app. function 1. add an item with a pic. the item gets an associated qr code. 2. scan a qr code, the qr code shows the pic of the added item”
The agent worked some Magic, code wrote, files appeared, it printed ‘Thinking’ a few times.
Then in 7 minutes this popped out….
BUT! But wait a minute…. I’ll believe it when i can USE it.
The test was to see if I could actually use the interface presented to perform the function described.
So I uploaded a pic of by business partner Roscoe.
The upload happened, the QR code was produced.
Part 1. PASS
I scanned the QR code on my phone.
And my dear friend Roscoe popped up on my screen and my jaw dropped.
Part 2. PASS
The key difference I found with Replit was that it not only could code.
The things I needed and found.
- Easy account setup at low cost.
- No environment config.
- Low overhead in technical knowledge required.
- Produces sandboxed working prototypes.
- Has live deployment options.
Code in isolation is not much use. So this tool has great tools for rapid prototyping. 1 person really is the new 10.
The ‘needs improvement’ stuff.
I understand that Replit is a newborn so i’ll be patient while they fix stuff. The agent gets stuck. It did for me a few times on a a few projects. It’s like a confusion, a loop that it can’t seem to break out of. This is frustrating because you can’t continue your project. The work around for me was to generate a new one, it only takes 7 minutes after all… but this is a pita (pain in the ass) because by the time it got confused i had spent some time on further refinements and developments.
Fixes can be hard to implement sometimes like agents getting confused so I’d happily take a workaround. You know the classic IT fix turn it off and turn it on again….
Replit will change software forever.
A diagram I found online showing the differences of the current options and Replit if you need the full stack.
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