> Except Replit isn't selling a tool but the entire software development flow ("idea to software"). A good analogy here is an autonomous robot using the chainsaw cutting its owner's arm off instead of whatever was to be cut.

I don't think users should be blamed for taking companies at face value about what their products are for, but it's actually a pretty bad idea to do this with tech startups. A product's "purpose" (and sometimes even a company's "mission") only lasts until the next pivot, and many a product ends up being a "solution in search of a problem". Before the AI hype set in, Replit was "just" a cloud-based development environment. A lot of their core tech is still centered on managing reproducible development environments at scale.

If you want a more realistic picture of what Replit can actually do, it's probably useful to think of it as "a cloud development environment someone recently plugged an LLM into".

> This is assuming the companies that are out to "replace developers" aren't going to solve this problem

I mean, yeah, but that feels like a fair assumption, at least as long as they're using LLMs.