A person still makes the decisions when Replit’s AI agents examine support requests and help carry out fixes. At TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco on Thursday, CEO and co-founder Amjad Masad pointed to that process as an example of what he calls a “self-driving company.”
The phrase wasn’t a reference to robotaxi makers. Masad envisions agents handling much of a business’s routine work, with human judgment and taste becoming more valuable. His argument that people would keep a central role alongside agents drew on both Replit’s experience and businesses developing and launching their own software with its AI coding tools.
For support at Replit, he outlined a process that starts with an agent examining every new ticket. It checks GitHub issues, the codebase, and Linear tickets to triage the request. That information accompanies the ticket when it reaches a support worker, helping them choose the next step. Should the worker decide to submit a patch, a click sends another agent to carry out the fix.
“You have an entire loop where agents did most of the work, but crucially, there’s human judgment in the middle, and we don’t think that’s going away anytime soon. You need human judgment; you need taste,” Masad explained.
Masad presented the support process as one part of a broader shift in how Replit works. The team had spent the past year examining AI’s effects on its workplace, particularly after agents grew more reliable sometime earlier that year. In his account, Replit had completely changed its way of operating, and agents now drove much of the work. His description of the outcome included a qualification: “sort of self-improving.”
Rather than replacing employees, Masad argued, agents were changing the tasks employees take on. He said Replit now devotes more time to choosing what to work on. Across the company, he observes more conversations and whiteboarding, as well as more time devoted to architecture and decisions about how to build things. He sees the self-driving-company idea as an effort to work out what AI transformation means for work’s future.
Addressing the Disrupt audience more broadly, Masad said everyone’s jobs had changed over the past year, perhaps those of attendees in particular. But many people across America and the rest of the world remained unaware that the change was coming, he said, and would likely find it surprising.
In discussions between Replit and other businesses, Masad said, the focus was increasingly on whether AI could help employees accomplish more and feel happier at work. He attributed that possible improvement in happiness to agents reducing boring tasks and leaving room for more creative work.
“There’s a positive vision of the world that Silicon Valley is not really putting out, and we’re hoping to do that,” Masad added.
