Replit (), formerly Repl.it, is an American AI company with natural language application development through its Agent platform. Founded in 2016 as a
online integrated development environment (IDE),
Replit creates software via AI with a platform called Agent.
History
Replit was co-founded by the
Jordanian programmers
A programmer, computer programmer or coder is an author of computer source code someone with skill in computer programming.
The professional titles ''software developer'' and ''software engineer'' are used for jobs that require a program ...
Amjad Masad, Faris Masad, and designer Haya Odeh in 2016.
It was incorporated in
San Mateo.
Its name comes from the acronym REPL, which stands for "
read–evaluate–print loop". Replit has transformed from a collaborative coding platform into an AI-powered software creation ecosystem centered around the ability to build complete applications by describing them in natural language. The company's Agent technology converts plain English descriptions into functioning software.
Before creating Replit, Amjad Masad worked in engineering roles at
Yahoo
Yahoo (, styled yahoo''!'' in its logo) is an American web portal that provides the search engine Yahoo Search and related services including My Yahoo, Yahoo Mail, Yahoo News, Yahoo Finance, Yahoo Sports, y!entertainment, yahoo!life, an ...
and
Facebook
Facebook is a social media and social networking service owned by the American technology conglomerate Meta Platforms, Meta. Created in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with four other Harvard College students and roommates, Eduardo Saverin, Andre ...
, where he built development tools. He also helped found
Codecademy
Codecademy is an American online interactive platform that offers free coding classes in 13 different programming languages including Python, Java, Go, JavaScript, Ruby, SQL, C++, C#, Lua, and Swift, as well as markup languages HTML ...
. Masad had come up with the idea for Replit over a decade before its creation.
In 2009, having seen significant advancements in browser and web technologies, Masad imagined a development environment built on the same premise as
Google Docs
Google Docs is an online word processor and part of the free, web-based Google Docs Editors suite offered by Google. Google Docs is accessible via a web browser as a web-based application and is also available as a mobile app on Android and iO ...
; that is, allowing the user to write and share code all in a web browser. In 2011, he produced an early
open-source
Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use and view the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open source model is a decentrali ...
version of this concept, called “JSRepl”.
Because Masad then spent a few years working at various companies,
including
Udacity
Udacity, Inc. is an American global for-profit massive open online course provider. It was founded by Sebastian Thrun, David Stavens, and Mike Sokolsky offering massive open online courses.
According to Thrun, the origin of the name Udacity com ...
and Codecademy, JSRepl was used to power Udacity and Codecademy's in-browser tutorials.
See also
*
Model Context Protocol
The Model Context Protocol (MCP) is an open standard, open-source framework introduced by Anthropic in November 2024 to standardize the way artificial intelligence (AI) models like large language models (LLMs) integrate and share data with exter ...
References
{{Generative AI
Online integrated development environments