Replit CEO Envisions the 'Self-Driving Company' as AI Reshapes Work

Replit CEO and co-founder Amjad Masad has watched AI coding tools change how businesses build and launch software. At TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco on Thursday, he shared what Replit has learned about work in the AI age, including the roles humans will keep as AI agents join them.

He described a "self-driving company" - not robotaxi makers, but a vision where agents handle much of the grunt work while people are valued more for judgment and taste.

"All of our jobs changed over the past year," he told the audience. "But a big part of America and the world, they still don't know that that change is coming, and it's going to be surprising to a lot of people."

Masad said Replit's team reflected on AI's impact on its own workplace, particularly after agents became more reliable earlier this year. "Our company entirely changed how we operate," he said, calling the closest analogy a self-improving company where agents drive much of the work.

At Replit, support tickets are first triaged by an agent that reviews GitHub issues, the codebase, and Linear tickets. By the time a request reaches a person, they have the information to decide how to proceed. A patch to apply a fix is one click to deploy another agent.

"You have an entire loop where agents did most of the work, but there's human judgment in the middle, and we don't think that's going away anytime soon," Masad said. "You need human judgment; you need taste."

Instead of taking jobs, agents are changing what people work on. "We're spending a lot more time figuring out what to work on," he said, noting more discussions, whiteboarding, and time on architecture.

He added that talks with other businesses focus on AI making people more productive and happier at work, since agents make work less boring and more creative. "There's a positive vision of the world that Silicon Valley is not really putting out, and we're hoping to do that," Masad said.