Mon, May 1, 2023Announcing Replit Extensions
At Developer Day, we revealed our commitment to increasing the extensibility of Replit to better serve the diverse needs of our community of makers and all developers. And today, we’re excited to announce a major milestone in our mission to empower a billion developers: the launch of Replit Extensions. Extending the Replit Environment Makers have an ever-present desire to have control over their tools. This is true in every creative domain, be it software, music, photography, or painting. What makes software unique is that much of the tooling is itself software, and with any mastery of software, you can begin to shape your tools to your needs. Making Replit extensible has been at the top of our minds since the beginning. We've been busy at work—we've iterated on our core primitives, our layout system, refactored our code towards modularity, allowed people to configure their Repls, and even replaced our code editor with one that's far more composable, with extensibility as one of the driving reasons.
Mon, May 1, 2023Copyright Law in the Age of AI: The Role of Licensing in Replit's Development
Thousands of unique users code in Replit every day. Few of them probably give much thought to the copyright that attaches to their code. They might be surprised to learn that copyright – specifically, the way that Repls are licensed – is fundamental to the way that Replit works. As the AI software revolution proceeds apace, copyright law is again playing a fundamental role in how it develops – and in how Replit brings the benefits of this technology to our users. We’ll explain all in this blog post. But before we get there, time for a history lesson. A brief history of software licensing The relationship between copyright and computer software wasn’t always obvious, even to lawyers. Early versions of the Unix operating system, developed at Bell Labs in the 1970s, were distributed freely along with their source code, so that the recipients of the code could hack on it. Decades later this led to a copyright lawsuit, but following its settlement, entirely free distributions of Unix became legally available, with their components licensed under free software licenses such as the MIT license.
Sun, Apr 30, 2023Replit Bounties: Ship Code in Your Sleep
"Through Bounties, I was able to get high-quality developers that are able to fulfill a problem statement really fast. Replit’s Bounty Hunters ensure that the client is happy with the end product and have a high quality of work product.. and are interested in making the best versions of the apps possible." @girlbossintech | Software Engineer Introduction @girlbossintech is a software developer and Twitter creator. She wanted to test out an idea for a social polling app, similar to popular polling web apps like Gas App, where users would be served a question and could select an option, which would then take them to the next question. However, being busy with work, she decided to outsource the implementation of this idea. After seeing Replit Bounties on Twitter and receiving a recommendation from a friend, @girlbossintech decided to try it out. Building the Prototype
Tue, Apr 25, 2023A Recap of Replit Developer Day
At Developer Day, we announced: Production-grade Deployments straight from your IDE A more powerful Workspace Secure Workspace Extensions Replit’s From-Scratch Trained Code Complete model Production-grade Deployments Straight from your IDE
Tue, Apr 25, 2023Raising $97.4M at $1.16B Valuation to Expand our Cloud Services and Lead in AI Development
Note: The press release for our funding announcement can be found below. You can find the original press release here. Replit is Building the Best Cloud and AI Development Experience for Software Creators Replit, the world's fastest-growing developer platform and creator of Ghostwriter, the generative AI for software development, announced the close of its $97.4 million financing round at a $1.16 billion post-money valuation. Replit will use the new funds to innovate on its core development experience, expand its cloud services for developers, and drive innovation in AI and LLMs through Ghostwriter. Investor Participation and Funding Details
Tue, Apr 18, 2023How to train your own Large Language Models
Learn how Replit trains Large Language Models (LLMs) using Databricks, Hugging Face, and MosaicML Introduction Large Language Models, like OpenAI's GPT-4 or Google's PaLM, have taken the world of artificial intelligence by storm. Yet most companies don't currently have the ability to train these models, and are completely reliant on only a handful of large tech firms as providers of the technology. At Replit, we've invested heavily in the infrastructure required to train our own Large Language Models from scratch. In this blog post, we'll provide an overview of how we train LLMs, from raw data to deployment in a user-facing production environment. We'll discuss the engineering challenges we face along the way, and how we leverage the vendors that we believe make up the modern LLM stack: Databricks, Hugging Face, and MosaicML. While our models are primarily intended for the use case of code generation, the techniques and lessons discussed are applicable to all types of LLMs, including general language models. We plan to dive deeper into the gritty details of our process in a series of blog posts over the coming weeks and months. Why train your own LLMs?
Tue, Apr 11, 2023Replit Deployments - the fastest way from idea → production
After a 5 year Hosting beta, we're ready to Deploy. Introducing Replit Deployments Today we’re releasing Replit Deployments, the fastest way to go from idea to production in any language. It’s a ground up rebuild of our application hosting infrastructure. Here’s a list of features we’re releasing today: Your hosted VM will rarely restart, keeping your app running and stable. You’re Always On by default. No need to run pingers or pay extra.
Mon, Apr 10, 2023Building the #1 LLM Comparison Tool with Bounties - nat.dev
"Replit bounties are a great way to find talented developers for adventures!" Nat Friedman / former CEO of GitHub About the Bounty Posters Nat Friedman is the former CEO of GitHub. He previously co-founded Xamarin, which was acquired by Microsoft in 2016. Before GitHub, Nat held several leadership positions at Microsoft, including Corporate Vice President of Developer Services. Nat is most known for his contributions to open-source projects, most recently nat.dev and the Vesuvius Challenge. Matt Huang and Alexandr Wang also contributed to this Bounty reward.
Wed, Apr 5, 2023Hackers, Pros, and Teams users can now code for hours without restarts
Stay Connected Starting today, all users on Hacker, Pro, or Teams plans will see a 10x reduction in container restarts while coding in the Workspace. Previously, you would experience a restart at least once an hour. Now you can code for multiple hours straight without restarts. Deep work can stay uninterrupted and you can keep programs running longer while you build. Repls are computers that live in the cloud. One of the most painful experiences with a cloud computer is losing your network link. Sometimes your network flakes out and things need to reconnect. But the worst version is when your Repl restarts. There are lots of reasons why this can happen. In the background, your container has stopped or died, and our infrastructure quickly starts up a new one to put you in. You can simulate this by typing kill 1 in the Shell.
Wed, Apr 5, 2023Replit + Chroma: AI for the next billion software creators
Guest post by Chroma Today we’re announcing the Chroma template for Replit, the next step towards bringing the power of AI application development to the next billion software creators. With the Chroma template, developers can easily create AI applications with state and memory. Want to make ChatGPT for your email? Or chat to your textbooks while you study? Want LLMs to know about the latest news stories? Together with Replit, Chroma makes all that and more easy.
Tue, Apr 4, 2023Replit Bounties: The Best Place to Build and Launch MVPs
"If I had turnkey access to this liquid, global talent pool in previous product roles, it would have been amazing for developing prototypes and taking ideas from 0 to 1." Christian Ulstrup / founder and CEO of GSD @ Work About the Bounty Poster Christian Ulstrup is the founder and CEO of GSD @ Work, a strategic consulting firm that advises pre-Series C startups and business leaders on strategy, product development, and GTM motion. Christian’s prior experience consists of all things product, from being a startup founder to leading cross-functional product teams at venture-backed medical device tech startups and larger companies like Red Bull.
Mon, Apr 3, 2023April 2 Potential GitHub Credentials Exposure
Yesterday, on April 2, 2023, Replit discovered a site vulnerability that may have exposed GitHub auth tokens for <0.01% of Replit users, stemming from use of the GitHub import feature. This could have permitted unauthorized read/write access to all the repositories of those users by default (users can choose to authorize just a subset of repositories). We have no indication that those exposed tokens were misused or used to exploit GitHub repositories. The vulnerability has been fixed, all existing GitHub auth tokens associated with the Replit app have been revoked, and access to the GitHub import feature has been restored. The number of exposed users was limited to <0.01% because there are two preconditions that needed to be met for a user’s Repl to be vulnerable: The Repl was created using the GitHub import feature; and One of:
Thu, Mar 30, 2023Applications of Generative AI Webinar
In case you missed it, last week we hosted legendary AI Researcher Jim Fan from NVIDIA AI for an incredible discussion on all things Generative AI. During a one-hour conversation with Amjad Masad, CEO and co-founder of Replit, and Michele Catasta, Replit's ML Advisor, the group discussed the recent advancements in AI and the potential impact of multi-modality on the field. Event Recap Jim Fan has worked in AI for a decade and has collaborated with several prominent AI researchers. He highlights the growth of AI from image recognition to large language models like GPT-4. Amjad shares his background in developer tools and his excitement about applying machine learning and statistical approaches to code. 2:50 - The discussion starts with the recent NVIDIA GTC event, with Jim describing NVIDIA's transition from a hardware provider to an enterprise-focused AI provider. He is mainly excited about NVIDIA AI Foundations, which offer customization services that allow enterprises to create unique use cases with multimodal language models. These models will also help incorporate images, videos, and 3D data into AI systems. 5:45 - Michele highlights the importance of multi-modality and how it grants superpowers in communications with computers. Jim envisions a range of possibilities with multi-modal language models, including being able to interact with more natural human input, enhancing note-taking, and automating home decoration plans.
Mon, Mar 27, 2023Replit and Google Cloud Partner to Advance Generative AI for Software Development
Note: Since this announcement, Replit AI has launched a series of new features and updates. For most current information, check out our Replit AI page. Original press release here Under the new partnership, Replit developers will get access to Google Cloud infrastructure, services, and foundation models via Ghostwriter, Replit's software development AI, while Google Cloud and Workspace developers will get access to Replit’s collaborative code editing platform. The collaboration will accelerate the creation of generative AI applications and underscores Google Cloud's commitment to nurturing the most open ecosystem for generative AI. For Replit, already 20 million developers strong, this partnership with Google Cloud is its next move in realizing its mission to empower the next 1 billion software creators.
Mon, Mar 27, 2023Building Ghostwriter Chat
At Replit, we strive to give our users the most powerful programming environment, and what better way is there than giving them an AI pair programmer directly in their workspace? Enter Ghostwriter Chat. Why we built Ghostwriter Chat Many IDEs today are not truly integrated; they lack the tools a developer interacts with throughout the course of their work. With Ghostwriter Chat, our goal is to give developers all the power they need without them ever having to leave the IDE. Gone are the days where you had to search Stack Overflow for an obscure error message, or visit the docs of your favorite package for the millionth time because you forgot what that one argument was called. And since Ghostwriter is built right into your repl, it can use things like file context, chat history, and program output to help you write code, answer questions, or even debug an error. No copying and pasting is required. We started working on Ghostwriter Chat during our Hackweek in January. The project took the first place prize, and we quickly found that we couldn’t live without it. We wanted to be the first to market with an LLM-powered chat application that is native to your editor. We decided to ship it, and did so in a month!
