Thu, Jan 11, 2024Company Spotlight: Qdrant Vector Database
With the rise of new generative AI development methods like retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), it can be difficult to demonstrate technical setup to developers and highlight the potential front-end products that can be created by these developer tools. To speed up developer onboarding, Qdrant has developed several Replit templates. They simplify the initial steps for new developers, such as setting up the development environment and installing packages, making the onboarding process smoother and faster. What is Qdrant? Qdrant is a high-performance vector database used at companies like AlphaSense, Disney, Flipkart, HRS, HP, Bayer, Dailymotion, Deloitte, Microsoft, Mozilla, and others. Qdrant exposes both HTTP and gRPC APIs so that you can integrate it with any programming language. They also have official Python, JS/TS, Rust, and Go SDKs, and various integrations with the most popular LLM frameworks, such as LangChain, LlamaIndex, and Deepset Haystack. Qdrant also has a custom extension of the HNSW algorithm, enabling both rapid and precise Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search, which is essential for real-time applications.
Thu, Dec 28, 2023Landscape or Portrait? You Decide
People have expected apps to rotate with their mobile devices since before the introduction of the iPhone in 2007. It’s especially important for productivity apps to adapt and let people choose how they want to utilize their screen space. With the newest version of the Replit Mobile App, you can now code in both landscape and portrait modes. This creates a significantly improved experience on smaller tablets like the iPad mini or larger phones like the Pixel Fold. Want to code on the go with your iPad mini? Simply rotate it to portrait, then later, when you’re home, connect it to your wireless mouse & keyboard and rotate it to landscape for maximal screen space. This is the first of many more improvements to the Replit Mobile App, unlocking your ability to build and launch your next startup from your phone. Updating the Replit Mobile App to respond to orientation changes required navigating a few key areas: Accounting for screen edge insets Creating a friendly API for reacting to and inspecting orientation information Sizing screen content correctly based on orientation The Replit app is built using Expo for React Native, and we use the react-native-safe-area-context library to ensure we display UI in the safe areas of the screen. The addition of camera cut-outs and gesture-based navigation to most smartphones in recent years has made it even more important to account for screen-safe areas when building for a wide range of mobile devices. Properly accounting for screen-safe areas means that the app’s interface isn’t shown under the camera cut-out or behind the system navigation UI. Here’s an example with an iPhone 15 Pro: the non-safe areas where the camera cut-out and system navigation UI live are highlighted in red.
Wed, Dec 27, 2023Replit in Review: A Recap of What We Shipped in 2023
In 2023, we brought the vision of idea to software, fast, to reality. We shipped the first conversational AI programmer to code your ideas faster, made AI available for everyone, and introduced Deployments to ship from where you write your code. We made coding on Replit a better and more productive experience by redesigning the Console, Git integration, Packages tool, and more. We released the Replit Desktop App so you could choose the form factor that works best for you. We’re not finished making Replit the best place to code, but here are some highlights from the past year! Product (01/29) Git in the Shell - The first step in improving our Git integration. Git command-line tools were improved and integrated with your GitHub account, allowing access to your repositories. (02/14) Announcing Ghostwriter Chat - The first conversational AI programmer. Ghostwriter Chat is a beta release that acts as a proactive debugger and understands your project’s context, making it a powerful AI pair programmer.
Tue, Dec 26, 2023Introducing Spellburst, A Replit x Stanford HAI Collaboration
At Replit, we’re lucky to work with brilliant people who are building the programming tools of the future. This past year, we had the privilege of sharing some of this design work with the broader academic research community. Tyler, design engineer at Replit, teamed up with Stanford University (Jenny Han – also former Replit intern), Miroslav Suzara, Christopher Pondoc, and Dr. Hari Subramonyam) to publish Replit’s first-ever peer-reviewed publication, Spellburst. In November, we presented our work at the ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST), one of the premier venues for human-computer interaction research in the world. This post will walk through what we built and researched, what we learned from the process, and some predictions for user interface design and AI in the future. Introducing Spellburst We went into this project knowing that we wanted to design for learning and creativity for coders. In our formative study, we interviewed 10 expert generative artists to understand their existing workflows. What we discovered about the exploratory process for creative work is that creative coders are constantly: Going from idea to code
Fri, Dec 22, 2023Builder Profile: Ismail Pelaseyed
Ismail Pelaseyed is the CTO and co-founder of Superagent, an open-source framework that enables developers to build, manage, and deploy AI Assistants. Ismail is an experienced developer who is dedicated to building open source software. After many years of running a successful consulting firm with his business partner, Alan Zabihi, they wanted to go back to building projects for themselves, focusing primarily on open source AI and agent frameworks. Eight years ago, Ismail and Alan built KeyCrunch (now Hyperdrive), which automatically writes marketing copy for users. They continued to expand the function of KeyCrunch into a tool that generates ad materials with the help of AI agents. Their goal was to get mainstream developers without expertise in ML to integrate AI into their applications. The company was eventually acquired by Jetshop, but Ismail and Alan continued to focus on agents and accessible AI dev frameworks in their next project: Superagent.
Thu, Dec 21, 2023Company Spotlight: CrewAI
AI agents are here to stay Large Language Models (LLMs) are everywhere, doing various jobs, from chatting to parsing documents. Soon after LLMs took the world by storm, developers started creating more focused, goal-oriented LLM apps modeled after human reasoning and problem-solving, which became known as AI agents. Here’s how one company is leveraging LangChain and Replit to solve complex tasks. AI agents with CrewAI CrewAI is a library specifically designed to build and orchestrate groups of AI agents. It's made to be straightforward and modular, so integrating it into your projects is a breeze. Think of CrewAI like a set of building blocks - each piece is unique, but they're all designed to fit together smoothly. Built on top of LangChain, it's inherently compatible with many existing tools, including local open-source models through platforms like Ollama. The AI agents can run natively on the cloud with Replit, making it even easier to get started with CrewAI. Check out the CrewAI templates on Replit to see the agents in action. Or, use them as a starting point for your own projects so you don't have to start from scratch. Here’s how it works.
Thu, Dec 21, 2023Dec 12 Incident Update: Secrets and repl.co Static Hosting Unavailable
Between Dec 12 and Dec 16, Secrets in interactive Repls and files in our legacy repl.co static hosting were unavailable. The root cause was a configuration push to GCS storage that was misinterpreted as a request for all the files to be evicted from storage. Deployments and Secrets in Deployments were unaffected. We have since recovered all known user Secrets and instituted new data retention procedures in our storage systems to ensure that this issue doesn’t reoccur. This will allow us to have a faster recovery going forward. This post summarizes what happened and what we're doing to improve Replit so that this does not happen again. Technical details Here is the timeline of what happened: On Dec 11, we pushed an update to our Terraform configuration for the Google Cloud Storage lifecycle of several buckets. This included a bucket where Secrets, legacy repl.co static hosting, and some Extensions are stored. This was done in an attempt to automatically delete any noncurrent object to save space. These buckets had object versioning enabled beforehand, and the update inadvertently set the daysSinceNoncurrentTime field to zero. Setting this field to zero caused the request to be interpreted as equivalent to setting age to zero, because it also missed explicitly setting isLive to false. This behavior was unexpected, which is tracked in the underlying Terraform provider in a GitHub issue. We quickly discovered the issue, and between Dec 12 and Dec 16 a recovery process was able to recover all known user Secrets.
Wed, Dec 20, 20239 AI Templates and Playgrounds for Your Business
Integrating the latest AI tools into your team can be a significant advantage. However, assessing these tools and setting them up to run can take time and effort. Whether you’re testing a new large language model or building a prototype with a vector database, chances are somebody has already developed a similar AI tool. Increasing developer productivity is a cornerstone of Replit, and we want to give you the tools to elevate your team and quickly incorporate the latest AI developer tools into your business. Fork one of the AI templates below and customize it for your requirements. Once you’re finished, you can deploy it with just a few clicks from Replit and share it with your team. In this post, we’ll highlight some of the top templates on Replit that can help you explore and integrate the latest AI developer tools. 1. Gemini vs GPT-4 Easily integrate and compare the two top-performing LLMs with this starter code. Each of these templates contains the proper way to make API calls to Google’s Gemini API in JavaScript and Python.
Tue, Dec 19, 2023GitHub x Replit Workflows: Enhancing Developer Productivity
As developers, we constantly seek tools that simplify our workflows and boost our productivity. We know that most code lives on GitHub, so we want to make running, maintaining, collaborating on, and deploying code from GitHub repositories effortless. Previously, importing a GitHub repository into Replit was a subpar experience. Finding the correct repository was time-consuming due to the lack of owner-based grouping and detailed repository information. The built-in Git Pane also sometimes felt incomplete and unintuitive. Recognizing these issues, we set ambitious goals to revamp our GitHub integration, focusing on improving a few key areas: the GitHub import form, authentication, and the Git Pane. GitHub import form redefined We designed the revamped import form to speed up the process of bringing GitHub repositories into Replit. Quickly locate your repositories with enhanced search functionality, including filters for owner and repo names. The form also allows for direct URL imports – a small but significant time-saver. For those working in teams or on collaborative projects, you can also import repositories you collaborate on in the From URL tab.
Fri, Dec 15, 2023Updates to Social Features on Replit
In 2024, we're excited to introduce improvements to our social features on Replit, all centered around making it easier to share and explore code. We learned from our top creators that a cover page's primary value is sharing code and giving other developers something to fork. Additionally, we recognized that viewing applications in an iframe is a suboptimal experience. Often, missing Secrets prevented the program from running as intended. The best way to view someone’s work is to visit the production deployment directly. With this in mind, we’re reimagining cover pages to focus primarily on code consumption. This shift marks a move away from running and viewing program outputs. Instead, we’re making these pages a hub for exploring and understanding code. Starting early next year, when you land on a cover page, it will show the project’s code or README file. They’ll be presented in an intuitive, editor-like environment for more straightforward navigation. When you find a project you want to work with, forking it is straightforward. We’ll set up an identical development environment for you so you can start making changes or running the code immediately.
Fri, Dec 15, 2023Skip the README, let us install for you
If you’ve ever tried to install a complex Python package, you know the pain of scouring the package’s README for the apt install or brew install commands necessary to bring in the system-level dependencies the package needs. This approach can be time-consuming and frustrating, especially when a cascade of errors indicates a missing system dependency — a pain point that isn't always immediately obvious. You can now skip the README and let us install everything for you. Replit will automatically install the system dependencies needed for hundreds of Python packages. When you add a package via the Packages tool or automatically install a package via package guessing, Replit’s Universal Package Manager detects system dependencies needed for these packages. This also extends to packages already in your pyproject.toml file, and adds the relevant system dependencies to your Repl’s replit.nix file. To illustrate the efficiency of this tool, let’s ask Replit AI to help us make a snowman. We’ll try to create a vector graphics image using Python’s pycairo library. To start, create a new Python Repl and select Generate Code with AI. Enter the prompt: “Using Python's pycairo, draw an SVG snowman. The snowman should have three balls of snow, a carrot nose, and two black eyes. Import math if you need it.” The full code is available in this Repl. Before automatic system dependency installation, you would have been greeted with an arcane error message like this, buried among hundreds of lines of output:
Wed, Dec 13, 2023Showcasing Startups on Replit
The fastest way to start, ship, and share The Replit platform isn't just a sandbox; it's a launchpad. There’s a lot to learn from startups building on Replit and how they leverage the platform to monetize and grow. Whether it’s a solo developer bootstrapping their startup on Bounties, or a startup launching their application on Replit Deployments, Replit is the best place to get from idea to software, fast. Here are a few companies building and shipping on Replit today. Lumiwealth The last thing financial traders want to do is spend hours learning how to set up a development environment just to deploy a trading algorithm. Why can’t writing code for a new algorithm be as easy as writing in a Google Doc? These were the questions Robert Grzesik had when starting his company Lumiwealth. With Replit, he could onboard hundreds of students into the real work of developing trading algorithms rather than lose much of his community in the complexity of setting up a development environment.
Mon, Dec 11, 20238 Templates for Businesses on Replit
Whether you’re building an AI support agent for your customers or a web scraper to collect marketing data, chances are somebody has already developed the tool you’re about to build for your team. Increasing developer productivity is a cornerstone of Replit, and we want to give you the tools to elevate your team and business practices quickly. Fork one of the templates below and customize it for your specific requirements. The app you build and deploy can scale with your business and adapt to changing goals, and you can use our AI code assistant to fine-tune it. In this post, we’ll highlight some of the top templates on Replit that can help you automate routine tasks, enhance customer experience, make data-driven decisions, and innovate your marketing and outreach strategies. 1. AI Support Agent Combine your documentation and internal knowledge with GPT-4, and get an agent that walks your users through basic product issues and questions. This template uses OpenAI, Pinecone, and LangChain to vectorize the files you upload and provide context to the AI. Fork the template and follow the instructions in the README.md file to get started building your AI-powered chatbot. In this demo, we embedded Replit documentation, and our agent can answer questions about Replit features and common bugs.
Thu, Dec 7, 2023New and Improved Console
The new Console has been launched for a while, bringing a whole new UI, persisted history of executions, metadata about the runs, and more! Let’s take a tour of where it came from, how it works, and how it was built. Brief history In the past, the Console looked very similar to the Shell and, depending on the Repl configuration, sometimes behaved like one: ...and sometimes did not:
Tue, Dec 5, 2023Company Spotlight: Techjays
Company Overview Techjays, a software development services company based in India and the US, specializes in helping startups and product companies evolve from idea to MVP. As a 100-person firm, Techjays primarily serves small to medium businesses offering IT services and consulting expertise. In the fast-paced world of technology, Techjays faced the challenge of rapidly prototyping and onboarding solutions for their clients. The traditional approach, which involved time-intensive Docker and Kubernetes setups, often delayed the sales process and hampered the efficiency of their development cycle, thereby affecting deal closures and client satisfaction.