Replit CEO Says Its New AI Agent Can Vibe Code a Startup From Scratch

Replit founder and CEO Amjad Masad says the company’s latest AI agent can vibe code an entire company from scratch. Masad, whose company released one of the first commercially available AI coding agents in 2024, has been at the forefront of the vibe-coding revolution, along with competitors Bolt and Lovable. Today, he announced that Replit has raised $400 million in a Series D round, and he also unveiled Agent 4, the newly updated version of its marquee product. Over 50 million people are currently using Replit to create apps and websites, according to a statement from Replit investor Georgian. The founder says that Agent 4 is capable of not just building an application, but actually creating and maintaining an entire company. Masad tells Inc. that Replit is now “the cockpit or the launch control of your business,” and can help develop pitch decks and animated logos, connect to payment processors like Stripe, and work on multiple tasks in parallel. As AI takes on more of the technical work of running a software business, Masad predicts, the role of humans will evolve to become more focused on creativity and taste. Even today’s best AI models have trouble understanding what aesthetically makes one version of an app “better” than another, he says, which is why Replit has focused on developing user interfaces that enable deeper creative interactions with AI. The key to Agent 4’s new abilities is a feature that Replit calls Canvas; it’s essentially a scratchpad for Replit to store all work created for a specific project. Individual elements (like a website, product research, and financial spreadsheets) are displayed as cards that you can move around and annotate. In a video example, Masad used Agent 4 to develop a job marketplace that helps companies find creative AI talent. First, he generated four variants of a landing page, and then iterated on the one he liked most. To change the color of a button, Masad simply highlighted the button and then used a gradient tool to select a new color. In practice, Canvas combines some of the no-code tooling of platforms like Figma with the convenience of AI coding models. For solopreneurs, Masad says, “it almost feels like you have a bunch of employees at your disposal.” Canvas and Agent 4 were partially inspired by sci-fi user interfaces, like the holographic displays used by Tony Stark in the Iron Man films, but even more so by a much simpler piece of hardware: a whiteboard. After introducing agents in 2024, Masad noticed the Replit office’s whiteboards getting significantly more use than previously. The reason? Replit employees had more time to focus on design rather than coding, and were using whiteboards to visually communicate their ideas to each other. Masad believed that this process of interaction could be recreated within the Replit platform. Just like a whiteboard, users can draw on Canvas, highlighting specific aspects of a website they want to change, or using arrows to indicate how different elements should interact. In his example website, Masad sketched an image of a globe in the Canvas, asked Replit to turn the sketch into an animated 3D asset, and then added that asset to the job marketplace. Masad says this adds a new level of interaction between the user and the platform, enabling discussions that might be closer to what you’d actually have with a human technical co-founder. “I think the tragedy of agents up until this moment was that we’re trying to squeeze this universe of ideas into this linear text box,” says Masad. “Now, you can be chaotic with it.” BY BEN SHERRY @BENLUCASSHERRY