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I was asked to talk about the future of 00:00
software. So, a lot of this talk is 00:02
going to be about what we're doing at 00:04
Replet, where we think the future of 00:06
software is headed and some kind of 00:08
trying to make some predictions or try 00:11
to think out loud about really what the 00:13
future holds. my mental model for for 00:15
our business and really for the moment 00:19
we're in today. If you think back uh uh 00:20
on the future on the history of 00:25
computing, mainframes were kind of the 00:27
the first mainstream computing devices 00:29
as mainstream as it gets back then. And 00:33
to use a mainframe, you needed to be an 00:36
expert. And then PCs came around and 00:39
initially PCs were kind of toys. you 00:43
bought a Mac and you did Mac Paint and 00:46
things like that. There wasn't real 00:48
business use case. I mean, people like 00:51
made fun of Apple at the time 00:52
uh until the Excel sheet. The Excel 00:56
sheet was the first software that was 00:59
actually useful on computers. And now 01:01
PCs run world economy. Like they 01:05
actually if you go at a data center, 01:08
it's also only PCs. It's x86 computers. 01:10
So you go you go from something that was 01:14
used by a small group of experts that 01:16
had to to have a lot of training to 01:20
something that started sort of as a toy 01:22
and is used by by everyone. Same thing 01:25
with software engineering like uh the 01:28
modern software engineering career you 01:30
can sort of trace it back to the u 70s 01:32
with the rise of maybe uh uh Unix and 01:36
the C programming language. That's when 01:39
people started uh kind of being trained 01:42
to become software engineers. You still 01:44
needed four, five, six years of uh educ 01:47
college education. You need another two 01:51
or three years of uh training on the job 01:53
to be able to actually do the job very 01:57
well. I think today software is going 02:00
through the same transition 02:02
from something that only experts do 02:06
to something that anyone can do. 02:10
And this is what we're really rep uh 02:13
building replet for. I've been working 02:15
at Replet for like almost nine years 02:17
now. And our vision has always been to 02:19
solve programming to like make 02:23
programming so make it so that anyone 02:25
can uh write software. So we built um an 02:27
IDE, we built uh language runtimes, we 02:32
built like a online sandbox environment, 02:35
we built deployments, we built cloud 02:38
services around all of that. And then 02:40
when AI came on the scene, we realized 02:42
that the ultimate expression of our 02:44
mission is to make it so that you don't 02:46
have to code. code is the sort of 02:48
bottleneck to actually getting a lot 02:50
more people making software. So around, 02:52
you know, late 23, early 24, we decided 02:56
to put all our resources into agents. At 02:59
the time, agents sort of barely worked, 03:02
but you could tell by looking at a few 03:05
benchmarks that were headed there. So, 03:08
SWEBench is a software engineering 03:10
benchmark. Uh it is basically a 03:12
collection of um issues on on GitHub 03:14
from major repositories and the unit 03:17
tests and pull requests sort of end 03:20
state of those issues and uh and the way 03:22
you test an agent is you put in an 03:25
environment and have it solve some of 03:27
those issues. You could tell like in in 03:28
22 sort of it barely worked. 23 started 03:31
sort of working and you could tell early 03:34
sort of early 24 where we're on this 03:36
trend where you could tell that software 03:38
engineering is getting automated or like 03:41
big parts of software engineering is 03:43
getting automated. Uh and now we're 03:44
probably I think this is like a little 03:47
outdated. We're like at 70 80% 03:48
Sweetbench. Now if this benchmark gets 03:51
saturated doesn't mean that we automated 03:53
all of software engineering but we're on 03:54
on our way to make really useful 03:57
arguably it's already here really useful 04:00
software engineering agents and by the 04:02
way this is true of any agent if any any 04:05
of you are building sort of agents 04:07
startups uh just like 04:09
really believe that it's coming really 04:12
really like I I keep telling my team we 04:15
need to be okay with building crappy 04:18
products today 04:19
because two months down the line the 04:21
models will get better and your business 04:24
your product will suddenly become 04:26
viable. So to today's kind of the moment 04:27
for for uh for agents so rapid kind of 04:30
went all in on agents but agents that 04:33
can write code uh is actually the easy 04:36
part. The hard part is the 04:39
infrastructure around it. Sometimes I 04:42
call it the habitat for which the agent 04:44
uh lives in. So what you need is you 04:47
need a a virtual machine, ideally in the 04:50
cloud, ideally not on your computer 04:52
because you know agents can actually 04:55
also mess up your computer. They could 04:57
do a lot of scary things. So it needs to 04:59
be sandboxed. Uh it needs to be 05:01
scalable. If you're running a product 05:03
like Replet, you need to be able to, you 05:06
know, scale up to like millions of users 05:07
and uh you need to be able to support 05:10
every language out there, every uh 05:13
package out there. Um the way uh 05:16
software engineering agents are trained 05:19
today is they're trained on standard 05:21
Linux environment. They need to be able 05:24
to use the shell. They need to be able 05:26
to write to files, read files. Uh but 05:27
they also need to able to install 05:30
packages either system level packages, 05:32
Linux packages, but also language 05:35
packages. And many cases agents want to 05:37
actually use more programming languages. 05:39
And so a lot of environments today where 05:41
people are trying to build agents are 05:43
very constrained. But what you what you 05:45
want is an environment as open as 05:47
possible similar to the kind of 05:49
environments that software engineers 05:51
work in. So what kind of other things 05:53
you need to ship real software you need 05:55
deployments, you need databases. Uh 05:58
really think about everything you do as 06:01
a software engineer and all those tools 06:02
need to be accessible uh to software 06:05
engineering agents. So actually I saw 06:07
earlier today if you were at uh 06:10
Karpathy's talk he he talked about how 06:11
you know the the coding part is the easy 06:14
part. So sort of similar to the points 06:16
I'm making but he talked about all the 06:17
different things that are really 06:19
unsolved but in reality we actually 06:20
solved a lot of them. So replet of the 06:22
gate comes with o uh agents are actually 06:24
not very good authentication. It's 06:28
better to use a service built-in 06:29
service. So replet actually one line of 06:31
code we turn on co uh off. So when ask 06:34
replet agent to integrate off uh it will 06:37
actually just use replet off. It will 06:40
just like basically turn on setting and 06:42
and then uh you have user authentication 06:45
you have user management those users 06:48
information are being stored in the 06:50
database. You can also obviously deploy 06:52
the app you can uh link a domain to it. 06:54
We have secrets management secure ways 06:57
of kind of uh using API keys. We have 07:00
background jobs. You know, a lot of 07:03
applications need to be able to run 07:05
continuously in the background, 07:06
especially in this era of agents. 07:07
Storage again, uh, you know, agents need 07:10
to be able to store things. They need to 07:13
be able to grab things from the web, 07:15
images, documentation, whatever, and 07:17
store them for the application to use 07:19
them in the future. Few other things on 07:20
the road map, universal model access. 07:22
So, it's really a pain right now to ask 07:25
the model to like to ask for an 07:27
application that can generate an that 07:28
can do something with an images or 07:30
videos. You have to figure out which 07:32
model to use. You have to go get an API 07:34
key and do all of that. Pretty soon, any 07:36
model that you ask for at Replet, it'll 07:38
be just available in your app directly. 07:41
We'll handle the the billing and the API 07:43
integration, all of that. Payments is 07:45
very important. Payments not just for 07:48
your users to pay for your application. 07:51
Say you're you're building a startup on 07:54
Replet. You're you're an entrepreneur. 07:55
you obviously need to collect uh user 07:58
payments, but also I think some sometime 08:00
in the future you would want your agent 08:03
to have some kind of wallet to be able 08:06
to go uh pay for services. So let's say 08:08
you know your your agent decides that it 08:12
needs a Tulio integration and replet or 08:15
whatever system you're using doesn't 08:18
have a tool integration, it should be 08:19
able to go put in its credit card and 08:21
provision that service in the in the 08:24
background. A more radical idea is that 08:25
your agent needs to be able to like hire 08:28
people. For example, if it hits a 08:30
capture and it doesn't know how to solve 08:32
a capture, it should go and task grab it 08:34
and ask a human to go solve the capture 08:36
for it. Whatever it is, there's a lot of 08:37
tasks that you still need humans for and 08:39
you would want your your agent to be 08:42
able to uh to have money to pay for 08:44
services. And similarly, agent to agent. 08:48
Um, you would want your agent to be able 08:51
to go on the on the market and find 08:53
other agents that can it can hire. Too 08:56
many YC startups are building uh agents 08:58
sort of agents for accounting, agents 09:01
for sales and so you need your software 09:03
engineering agents to be able to 09:05
integrate those agents as well. So it's 09:07
so I I know a lot of people think of MCP 09:09
as such an agent to agent tool but 09:11
actually MCP is a more traditional RPC 09:13
protocol. So it's not really going to 09:16
solve this. Another model on our sort of 09:18
business or technology is think about 09:20
sort of the level of autonomy. So when I 09:23
started working on what Replet would 09:25
become like years ago, perhaps decades 09:27
ago, the state-of-the-art code assist 09:29
was a language server, right? That's 09:32
IntelliSense if you're using VS Code. 09:34
And you can think of it as level one 09:37
autonomy. You know, if you think about 09:38
the uh sort of drive assist in 09:40
self-driving cars or like in cars, you 09:43
know, would be kind of the lane assist, 09:46
that would be the first level. Uh AI 09:48
code completion co-pilot, that would be 09:51
level two. Uh level three is what we 09:53
worked on um when agent when replet 09:56
agent first launched. Agent v2 I I would 09:59
call it almost 3.5. It can work up to 10 10:03
15 minutes on its own but it still needs 10:06
your input every now and then to test 10:09
the app and make sure the app is 10:11
working. And right now we're working on 10:12
V3. I'll talk a little bit more about V3 10:15
in a second. Uh but V3 is sort of level 10:17
four, right? Like you're almost there. 10:20
It still needs some of your attention, 10:22
but it it kind of works fully uh 10:24
autonomously. 10:26
Bore Plus, which I assume we're going to 10:28
get to in the next couple of years, you 10:31
can really spin up a thousand agents, 10:33
give them a lot thousand problems and 10:35
and reliably be confident that like 95% 10:38
of them is going to work. Like we're 10:41
going to have a really high reliability 10:43
rate. any kind of engineer or product 10:45
manager really anyone can spin up 10:49
hundreds if not thousands of engineers 10:52
to do work on their behalf. So they need 10:54
very little supervision and therefore 10:56
you can uh increase your impact 10:59
exponentially as as a as a programmer. 11:01
So what we're working on right now with 11:04
uh Asian v3 is uh that you know it's 11:07
based on uh basically three uh three 11:11
pillars. One is uh end to-end testing. 11:15
So today computer use is um so in models 11:19
what's called computer use if you've 11:24
used openi operator it's the idea that 11:25
models can go into a computer you know 11:29
click around and use a computer like a 11:31
human does they're slow they're 11:33
expensive they're not very good but this 11:36
is what I talked about earlier you want 11:40
to build a product at the edge of what's 11:42
possible right now the edge of what's 11:44
possible is like computer use in my opin 11:46
is really at the frontier of what these 11:49
models could do and I think over the 11:52
next 3 to 6 months they're going to get 11:54
a lot better and it's going to enable an 11:57
entire new market and also probably 11:59
start to automate a lot of real jobs 12:01
once we have app testing uh you know 12:04
this this kind of annoying thing that 12:07
replication does where keeps ask asking 12:09
you to do QA for it'll start doing QA on 12:12
its own and that will allow it to work 12:15
you know 30 40 up to hour maybe two 12:17
hours of work. Sort of the hype today is 12:20
test time compute. If you think about 12:23
the sort of 03 uh or like oer models or 12:24
deepseek R1 the kind of main insight 12:29
there is the more tokens the model is 12:31
able to consume or produce 12:34
uh the more intelligent uh it gets. Now 12:37
today with something like 03 the model 12:42
is generating a lot of tokens and trying 12:46
to reason but a lot of it is sort of 12:48
synopsistic. It doesn't get feedback 12:50
from the environment. It's almost like 12:52
it's just sitting in place and thinking. 12:54
What you'd want in a real computer 12:57
environment is for the model to generate 13:00
hypothesis and test its hypothesis in 13:02
real time. So at Replet, we built a uh 13:05
fully transactional reversible uh file 13:10
system. So when you're on on Replet, 13:13
every edit you make to the file system 13:16
is an atomic snapshot in time. And that 13:19
allows us to have very cheap copy and 13:22
write forks of the file system. And so 13:26
our idea for this is that um anytime 13:30
there's a tough problem or basically if 13:33
you have a lot of budget you can have it 13:35
on all the time but every time the agent 13:38
is making a big change it forks itself 13:41
and the environment in number of times 13:45
to solve this problem in different ways 13:49
and then find the best solution and then 13:52
take that solution merge it into the 13:54
main branch. 13:56
So think about you know the idea of 13:58
simulations like when you're thinking 14:00
about the problem you're often 14:02
simulating different branches of things 14:04
that you could do you have different 14:06
hypothesis you want to test and so we 14:08
want to also 14:10
uh give agents the ability to do that. 14:12
So at any given problem generating a ton 14:16
of different ways of doing it and then 14:19
testing all of them in parallel. This 14:21
will bring up reliability of agents by I 14:23
think two to three folds. So that's 14:27
sampling and simulations. And then 14:30
finally is uh for the uh model to be 14:32
able to generate tests for every feature 14:37
that it creates. Today replet replet 14:39
agent often creates a feature and then 14:42
later on breaks that feature but also 14:45
true of clot code and cursor and all the 14:48
others. So we want to make it so that 14:50
once the agent makes a set of changes or 14:52
feature, it always has tests that it 14:55
runs on every change to make sure it's 14:58
not breaking the software. This is 15:00
actually harder than it sounds like it 15:02
sounds like okay write tests and let's 15:05
run them. But often actually models are 15:07
pretty bad at generating unit tests. So 15:10
there's still a lot of work uh to do 15:13
there. It needs to be fast as well so so 15:15
that it happens on every change. So I so 15:17
that's what we're working on with V3. 15:21
That's a lot of infrastructure work. 15:24
Want to create the best habitat for 15:25
agents to to live in and be able to u 15:28
the most be the most reliable possible. 15:31
But like let's fast forward to like what 15:34
I talked about with like level five 15:37
autonomy. Really the most autonomous 15:39
system we can think of. 15:41
>> YC's next batch is now taking 15:42
applications. Got a startup in you? 15:44
Apply at y combinator.com/apply. 15:47
It's never too early and filling out the 15:50
app will level up your idea. Okay, back 15:52
to the video. 15:55
>> My prediction is that all application 15:56
software will go to zero. In other 15:58
words, software will be dirt cheap, that 16:01
no one will be making money on the 16:04
traditional type of SAS software. I'm 16:06
not saying this will happen tomorrow or 16:09
even next year. I gave up on the the um 16:11
trying to predict timelines. I know it's 16:15
going to happen on the order of years. 16:17
If anyone with one prompt can generate 16:19
any kind of software of any type of 16:22
complexity, then um the value of 16:24
applications will go down to almost 16:28
zero. So what does that actually look 16:32
like? So today you know in the startup 16:34
ecosystem in the tech ecosystem there's 16:37
all these generic generic SAS you know 16:39
vertical SAS software and any of you 16:42
who's running a small business or even a 16:45
bigger business you you probably have 16:48
bought you know dozens and dozens of SAS 16:50
software just to uh just to run your 16:52
business even today you're able to 16:55
replace large parts of those software by 16:57
using something like replet agent or 16:59
writing your own software uh I think in 17:01
the next few years. This again this will 17:03
go from uh you know maybe 15% 17:06
replaceable to 100% replaceable. So this 17:08
will really fundamentally change the 17:11
software market. Uh just to give you a 17:13
story uh one of our colleagues at Replet 17:15
uh Kelsey was uh she works in HR uh 17:18
she's never written a line of software 17:22
in her in her life and she wanted an 17:24
orchar software. She had a few bespoke 17:28
needs like she wanted to connect it to 17:32
ADP, our our sort of payroll software 17:34
and and she had a few features that that 17:38
she wanted and she went on the market 17:40
and she couldn't really find an org shot 17:42
software that exactly fits her needs. 17:46
They were very expensive that were going 17:48
to cost tens of thousands of dollars a 17:50
year. So she decided to make it. She 17:51
took a week, less than a week, three 17:54
days, and she made orshot software that 17:56
we're using today that we can go out on 17:59
the market and sell it as a SAS product 18:01
for tens of thousands of dollars a year. 18:03
So that's like mind-blowing, right? I 18:05
mean, it's HR professional can make 18:07
software to run their work. That's 18:11
happening today. Try to project that out 18:13
a couple years later. Like the software 18:16
business fundamentally changes, gets 18:18
disrupted. Not only software but I think 18:20
how we work, how businesses works, how 18:24
corporations work will will 18:26
fundamentally change. 18:29
Today 18:32
we have these roles you know uh 18:33
companies like to specialize since the 18:35
industrial revolution when factories you 18:39
know became the main mode of creation. 18:43
the sort of modern uh special, you know, 18:46
specialization in the economy kind of 18:50
emerged where one person is making one 18:52
part of the the the product. It goes on 18:55
a factory sort of um assembly line and 18:57
another person is responsible for 19:00
testing it, another person responsible 19:02
for assembling it. And so this this um 19:04
specialization has been the way the 19:07
economy has been trending for a long 19:09
time. And it sort of makes sense, right? 19:11
You want to uh specialize people as much 19:13
as possible. You want them to be as as 19:15
replaceable as possible. And so this is 19:17
how the modern economy is built. But 19:20
once your HR professional is also a 19:22
software engineer is also potentially a 19:26
marketer is also potentially anything 19:28
because they can learn anything. There 19:30
are AI agents that can do anything for 19:32
them. really, you know, you go into the 19:34
world where jobs will become less 19:37
specialized, less um siloed. And in 19:40
fact, we started, we're seeing it today 19:44
and we're at Replet the way we're 19:46
structuring our orchard and our business 19:49
based on this idea. We're building for 19:51
the first time, we're building a like a 19:54
actual product team, product management 19:55
team. And our product team is actually 19:57
made of designers, engineers, and 20:00
product managers all almost always in 20:02
the same person. 20:04
So we're trying to merge a lot of roles 20:06
together and create this generalist 20:08
employee. So the the arch will start to 20:10
look more like a network than a 20:12
hierarchy. So it'll look more like an 20:14
open source project than a than uh it 20:17
will look like a traditional company 20:20
hierarchy with a marketing department, 20:22
sales department. Every employee will 20:24
like wake up in the morning and their 20:28
mandate would not be write this 20:32
marketing email or you know make this uh 20:35
optimize this button. Their mandate 20:39
would be make the business work, 20:41
generate value for the business. So 20:43
everyone is sort of an entrepreneur and 20:46
that will really disrupt and 20:48
fundamentally change how companies work. 20:49
It's a model that really we haven't you 20:52
no one has really embraced or or or even 20:54
started to talk about but really you 20:57
know think it through if everyone has 20:59
access to a general purpose software 21:02
engineering agent and sort of agent for 21:04
every possible role obviously domain 21:06
expertise is still important but is not 21:09
as important as it used to be. It's 21:12
exponentially less important and this 21:14
also affects how people build 21:16
businesses. it affects the opportunities 21:18
that are available for us in the future. 21:20
One uh really interesting book uh that I 21:24
read this book is was written in the 80s 21:27
which is insane given how good the 21:31
predictions were. So I'm just going to 21:34
read this. Ideas will become wealth. 21:36
merits wherever it arises will be 21:39
rewarded as never before. In an 21:41
environment where the greatest source of 21:44
wealth will be the ideas you have in 21:46
your head rather than the physical 21:48
capital alone, anyone who thinks clearly 21:50
will potentially be rich. The 21:52
information age will be the age of 21:55
upward mobility. The brightest, most 21:56
successful and ambitious of these will 21:59
emerge as truly sovereign individuals. 22:01
Now, some of these various is a bit 22:03
dated. The information age perhaps we 22:05
call the intelligence age today. 22:07
But this book predicted things like uh 22:09
crypto, remote work, all sorts of things 22:11
like that. And this idea of like a 22:13
sovereign individual, someone so uh 22:15
empowered by technology, so empowered by 22:19
these uh uh agents 22:22
uh that is able to create enormous 22:26
amount of wealth uh individually is is 22:28
uh is is going to be the norm. Think 22:32
think about um someone like Satoshi. 22:35
Satoshi created a single person created 22:39
a trillion dollars worth of value. I 22:42
don't know what the market cap exactly. 22:45
Perhaps it's more than trillion dollars 22:47
of Bitcoin. But like that's a single 22:49
person. They wrote the paper. They wrote 22:52
the software. They put it out there and 22:54
it became a big thing. Obviously there's 22:56
a lot of people. It's a big market right 22:57
now. But it was created by a single 22:59
person and we don't know who they are. 23:01
And I think that's going to be a common 23:03
occurrence in the future. The really 23:04
great thing about it is really um the 23:07
access to opportunity will be universal. 23:09
The idea of merit being rewarded 23:12
wherever it arises doesn't matter if 23:14
you're in Silicon Valley or anywhere 23:16
else in the world. If you can think 23:18
clearly and you can use some of this 23:21
technology. If you can think clearly and 23:24
generate good ideas, go into replet, put 23:26
in those ideas, make the first version 23:28
of software today, you can start to 23:31
become more like the sovereign 23:33
individual. Again, the way collaboration 23:35
work will be will be seamless. You know, 23:37
everyone's talking about the you know $1 23:39
billion single person company, but I 23:41
think that really kind of misses the 23:44
point a little bit. What's really 23:45
interesting about it is that you'll be 23:47
able to assemble groups of people really 23:49
quickly. You'll also be a be able to 23:51
assemble uh groups of agents really 23:53
quickly. You'll be able to assemble 23:56
these companies and also unwind them. 23:58
You can create mission purpose, you 24:00
know, companies or like projects and 24:02
unwind them really quickly. And in some 24:05
cases it could happen in a day or two. 24:07
And sometimes you might be you might 24:09
think you're working with another human 24:11
on the internet, but they're actually an 24:13
agent built by someone else who's out 24:14
there doing work for them. So the way we 24:16
work uh and the way people build 24:20
startups will fundamentally change as 24:22
the the cost of transaction goes down 24:25
goes down to zero then um the the the 24:28
reason to hire an employee full-time 24:33
uh you'll have less of a reason to hire 24:36
full-time employees. So think about um 24:38
like getting an Uber today. The 24:41
transaction cost the kind of effort of 24:43
getting an Uber is just one button on 24:45
your phone. I think the same thing will 24:47
be in the future to to get a developer 24:49
whether it's a software agent or another 24:51
human being. Uh it'll be just like one 24:54
button. I want this problem solved. 24:57
You'll be able to maybe your agent will 24:59
be able to go find and interview a lot 25:02
of different people or agents on the 25:04
internet and be able to find the best uh 25:07
thing to solve that problem. And um and 25:10
so you'll be able to like build 25:13
businesses really at the speed of light. 25:14
Now you know I I I talked about how kind 25:16
of application software goes to zero. 25:18
That doesn't mean that all software goes 25:20
to zero. Today you know rapid agent or 25:21
others the way it works is the agent 25:25
makes a piece of software the user uses 25:27
the software to solve problems. You can 25:30
think of those things as intermediate 25:33
steps. Instead, 25:35
agents can just solve problems. 25:38
And and for Replet, and I'm sure a lot 25:41
of other businesses to survive, at some 25:43
point, Replet needs to stop being 25:46
focused on making applications 25:48
and start being focused on solving 25:50
problems with software. So, I want to 25:52
leave ample time for for questions. So, 25:54
I'll I'll I'll end here and open it up. 25:58
>> My name is Chinat from Stanford. Nice to 26:01
meet you. My first question is in this 26:03
future do you see there potentially 26:05
humans engaging with multiple agents or 26:07
will there be a unilateral agent and if 26:10
in the case of like multiple agents um 26:12
how would we deal with the fragmentation 26:15
of like data memory and context across 26:17
all these different agents 26:20
>> I think multiple agents uh and and the 26:22
reason I think that's true is because 26:25
let's let's say I'm someone with true 26:27
unique domain expertise 26:29
uh let's say I'm I'm a lawyer who is top 26:32
in the world at solving certain um 26:36
cases that that are very rare. And so I 26:42
have this domain expertise that I'm not 26:46
going to share in the open source. I'm 26:48
not going to sell to scale AI so that 26:50
they can sell to to OpenAI or Google all 26:52
of those. I'm just going to keep this 26:55
resource to myself. But the way I would 26:56
monetize it instead of myself going and 26:58
selling my services directly, I would 27:01
like imbue this knowledge into an agent 27:03
that becomes this very specialized agent 27:05
in this very specialized domain and then 27:08
I can scale myself. uh and so so I think 27:10
I think people will be building these 27:14
agents to work on their behalf and then 27:17
um there's going to be agents that that 27:20
uh go out there and assembles these 27:24
teams of agents uh and then there's 27:26
going to be obviously software 27:28
development agents and maybe there's and 27:30
maybe you're running all all this 27:33
through chat GPT or whatever main 27:34
interface you have but I think it's 27:36
going to be a multi- aent world with 27:38
different contacts similar that we have 27:41
in the world today. When I go to a 27:43
lawyer, I need to give them my context. 27:45
So, uh, and maybe there are protocols 27:48
and this is why they talked about how 27:52
MCP really doesn't solve the agent to 27:53
Asian problem. I think there needs to be 27:55
more interesting protocols in this space 27:57
that and maybe this is a startup someone 27:59
builds. 28:01
>> Hi, thank you for the insightful talk. 28:02
My question is as follows. in the not so 28:04
far off future where we're going to have 28:07
AI systems that can automate most if not 28:09
all of meaningful physical and cognitive 28:13
tasks and there's increasing delegation 28:15
to agents that work on your behalf and 28:18
talk to other agents that are working on 28:20
other people's behalf then what is left 28:22
for humans to do or like what will our 28:25
human condition look like because our 28:27
physical and cognitive aspects can all 28:29
be done by intelligences 28:31
>> I I think it fundamentally 28:34
depends on your 28:37
worldview and belief of the limits of AI 28:41
versus the 28:44
uniqueness and premacy of what humans 28:46
can do. So it becomes a bit of a 28:49
religious discussion but my view is 28:51
there's something special about humans 28:54
and my view is that there's a 28:57
fundamental limitation with how we do AI 28:59
today and maybe this gets solved but AI 29:01
today can't truly generalize out of 29:03
distribution 29:06
everything AI can do h needs to be 29:08
represented in the data say I go back to 29:10
this example of this lawyer that is 29:12
expert in the world at very rare cases 29:15
uh again this is something that no one 29:18
else knows how to do uh or can do or 29:21
whenever there's like a truly novel 29:25
problem, truly novel case, you still 29:27
need human ingenuity 29:29
um to solve that problem. And so I think 29:32
humans will be more in the creative seat 29:37
and I think agents can be creative as 29:41
well but their type of creativity are 29:43
not net new knowledge. It's more like 29:44
about uh which is a lot of what 29:47
creativity is bringing a lot of 29:49
different things together. And so but 29:50
but this idea of like ideas become 29:53
wealth uh is um is what gets really 29:55
exciting about it is like people can 29:59
generate novel ideas and test them out 30:01
really quickly which you know I don't 30:04
think we're going to get to a to a point 30:06
where you can go tell an agent hey go 30:07
find me a you know business idea and go 30:10
test all of them. I don't think we'll 30:12
get there anytime soon. Thanks for your 30:14
talk. I've been following Replet for 30:16
many years and that's actually where I 30:18
learned how to code as well was on 30:19
Replet. So you mentioned the value of 30:20
clear thinking and ideas being the 30:23
future. Do you see this as an argument 30:24
more towards a favor of a liberal arts 30:26
critical thinking model of education 30:29
instead of a more STEM uh skills-based 30:31
focus? 30:34
>> I don't I don't think they're mutually 30:34
exclusive, but I do think that the 30:36
liberal arts will become more valuable. 30:37
I I think today engineers 30:40
tend to be uh a little more parochial 30:43
than they can afford to be in the future 30:48
because you know what I shot what I 30:51
showed with the kind of the model for 30:52
what the future company could look like. 30:55
Everyone becoming more of a generalist. 30:57
I think today engineers can afford to 31:00
like not understand even the business 31:01
they're in. A lot of engineers are just 31:02
focused on very narrow domains. Uh so I 31:04
think people need to have a more broaden 31:08
worldview and set of skills. So um but I 31:12
don't think they're mutually exclusive. 31:15
I think 31:17
you know being being scientifically 31:18
minded I think is going to be important. 31:21
>> Hi. Yeah. Uh so I wanted I was more 31:23
curious as to uh where in the tech stack 31:26
like is replet making a lot of progress 31:30
because as you said uh replet can do 31:33
tasks which for for one hour and so 31:35
given that like replet uses probably 31:39
closed source models which have no 31:42
access to pre-training and post- 31:44
trainining uh where in the text are you 31:46
making that like amazing uh kind of 31:49
innovation? that gets your models to 31:53
work auton autonomously for like an 31:56
hour. 31:58
>> It's what I was calling the habitat of 31:59
the model. So, you know, the um the 32:01
commercial models can train really great 32:05
models. They can train them to be as 32:07
autonomous as they as as possible to be 32:10
coherent over a long period of time. But 32:14
uh us or really any um agent company 32:17
needs to be able to provide the 32:21
infrastructure for for that agent to to 32:23
exist in. And so all these components 32:26
that I talked about. So one really 32:28
crucial thing about replet is this idea 32:30
of uh you could call it trans uh being 32:32
being transactional or atomic. every 32:36
mutation to the replet computer 32:40
environment 32:43
happen in sync with every other uh 32:44
component of the system. So right now in 32:48
replet if you go to your history you can 32:51
see previous checkpoints and you can 32:54
actually go to any one of them and 32:56
reboot the application in that state and 32:58
so we think that infrastructure is going 33:01
to be really crucial for how to make um 33:02
the models more more reliable. I think 33:06
there's a limit on how much the training 33:08
can increase reliability, 33:12
but I think the environment feedback and 33:14
the ability to try things really fast is 33:16
the way to get to the upper echelon of 33:18
reliability. So that's what we're 33:20
focused on. 33:22
>> Hi. So you talk about the generalist 33:22
employee and how that's the sort of 33:24
future of um companies. I I to I totally 33:26
agree with this vision, but where I find 33:30
myself stuck is finding roles today that 33:32
set me up for that kind of future. what 33:34
what kind of opportunities should we 33:36
look out for? What kind of positions 33:38
should we look out for in startups, in 33:39
companies that would prepare us with the 33:41
skills that are necessary in order to be 33:43
a generalist good employee five five 33:44
years down the line when that finally 33:46
becomes a thing. I know being a founder 33:47
is one option but 33:49
um not all of us want to take that 33:52
career plunge immediately. Uh some of us 33:53
want to work with other people, build 33:56
teamwork skills and learn all of those 33:57
other things as well. How do we go about 33:59
that? Jo join startups as early as 34:01
possible. Like obviously you can think 34:03
of it of it as um sort of exponentially 34:06
decaying uh curve where like being the 34:10
first being the founder you get the most 34:14
generalist experience being the you know 34:16
first employee and then by the time you 34:20
get to the hund I don't know like to the 34:22
maybe 100th employee you're sort of like 34:24
you're not getting as much of that 34:26
journalist experience but like just join 34:28
as early as you can depending on your 34:30
risk risk profile and and all of that. 34:33
But even like number 20 at a like a 34:35
series B company, I think you will get a 34:38
lot more experience than at a at a fang 34:40
or something like that. Even if you join 34:42
that startup, you need to be seeking 34:45
those generalist opportunities. So don't 34:48
sit there waiting for people to give you 34:51
tasks. Have that mindset of I'm waking 34:52
up in the morning. I'm not looking at a 34:56
to-do list. I'm looking at a mission. 34:58
and my mission is to make this company 35:00
succeed or be more valuable. 35:02
>> Um, hi, my name is Shivam. I also wanted 35:03
to ask about the one hour of autonomous 35:06
like agent development. Uh, specifically 35:08
like could you like elaborate a little 35:11
more on how like you and your team 35:14
approach how long of a time horizon is 35:15
worth pursuing as opposed to improving 35:18
reasoning for shorter time horizons. So, 35:20
so I think the what you're talking about 35:23
with shorter time horizons is more like 35:25
uh let's um let's work on reliability 35:28
um and then longer time horizons like 35:32
let's work on autonomy um removing the 35:34
human in the loop and the burden of the 35:38
human to continue to test and give 35:39
feedback. Um so we're doing both. When 35:40
I'm talking about reliability, this is 35:44
more investing in reasoning and more 35:46
investing in this parallel agent. 35:48
um trial and error that I was talking 35:51
about while we're calling sampling and 35:53
simulations. 35:55
And then for uh long horizon, it's more 35:56
about testing, 35:59
making sure that because as you go 36:01
longer, the there's like an there's a 36:03
like a gold drift. The the agent might 36:07
start doing things that you don't like, 36:09
but having those guard rail rails of of 36:11
testing along the way uh will make it so 36:13
that it stays more coherent uh over 36:16
time. And then as we collect more data 36:18
about what fails and what doesn't work, 36:21
you can either uh like go and fine-tune 36:24
that or you can just like continue to 36:27
improve the prompts uh and add more 36:29
guard guardrails to to make it better. 36:31
So I think both are important. 36:34
>> Hi, I'm Sophia. Um have been thankful 36:37
for your talk and I've been following 36:40
you met at AI for developers when you 36:41
were talking about ghostriter and the 36:43
work behind it. Um, but I'm curious to 36:45
hear more about how agents are kind of 36:47
over oversaturating 36:50
um, uh, certain set certain sectors and 36:52
um, whether or not that should kind of 36:56
you should consider that when you're uh, 36:59
working on them or joining a startup 37:01
that's working on something. 37:03
>> I think certainly software is like 37:04
really tricky. software engineering 37:06
agents. There's like there's a lot of 37:08
people that want to do that. And if 37:10
you're coming in late, you want to have 37:12
a truly novel idea to be able to like 37:14
compete there. But, you know, there's a 37:17
lot of things like who's who's building 37:19
the agent for HR or finance. Uh I know 37:21
one company's doing accounting. Uh 37:25
there's a lot of companies doing SDR for 37:28
whatever reason. That's very crowded. 37:30
What I would start with is what are you 37:32
interested in and what where do you have 37:34
domain knowledge? So the best way to 37:36
start an agent company is that if you 37:40
yourself 37:42
you're you yourself you're like a 37:44
compliance officer, 37:45
you start uh a a compliance officer or 37:48
you're passionate about compliance. I 37:51
don't know who's passionate about 37:52
compliance, but if you're passionate 37:53
about compliance, uh, go start an Asian 37:54
company because you're going to learn 37:57
the most about it and you're going to 37:58
have the most domain knowledge and 37:59
domain knowledge is the most important 38:00
thing to build an Asian company. Hey, 38:02
um, so if the cost of software and 38:04
building software is going to zero, then 38:07
by extension, the platforms which build 38:09
software like Replet, 38:11
like the value capture will be going 38:13
down to zero. So, how are you planning 38:15
to make money long term and how are you 38:16
going to compete with like the other 38:18
competitors like Bolton and lovable? 38:20
>> Yeah. Yeah. So, notice that I I said not 38:22
uh old software. I said like application 38:25
software specifically. So, I think 38:27
software will continue to run our lives 38:29
but a lot of it will be autonomous. So 38:31
for example, I build a lot of personal 38:34
software using Replet and a lot of it is 38:37
around managing my life and my family 38:40
and like you know uh doing a lot of 38:43
quantified self stuff a lot of like you 38:46
know data about my sleep and and and all 38:48
of that stuff and then I spent a lot of 38:51
time like plotting that data and doing 38:53
all of that stuff like instead I should 38:55
be able to tell replet agent here are my 38:57
goals you figure out what kind of 38:59
software that needs to that we built and 39:02
you figure out how to how to uh operate 39:04
it and you tell me what wearables I need 39:06
to buy and what um and and what do I 39:09
need to log in the morning, what do I 39:13
need to do and she'll be able to go make 39:14
the software 39:16
uh acquire the things that I need in my 39:18
home, what kind of sensors and then 39:21
solve the problem for me. I think I 39:23
think Replet needs to become a universal 39:25
problem solver for our company to 39:26
survive. And I think for a lot of the 39:29
others, you know, I I think it's 39:30
already, especially the companies that 39:32
you talk about in the prototyping space, 39:34
it's already getting really crowded 39:36
there. I think what replet where really 39:38
Replet excels today is the fact that 39:39
it's full stack. It can go from idea to 39:41
a deployed and scaled software. 39:44
>> Hi, uh my name is Emma and I'm really 39:47
intrigued by your vision of this future 39:49
where all code is written by agents. But 39:51
I'm also kind of concerned because there 39:53
is this kind of known problem where if 39:54
you train a generative model on data 39:56
that is generated by another model, you 39:58
get an issue of like accumulating error, 40:00
accumulating noise. So my question is in 40:01
this future where code is written by 40:04
agents, it's tested by agents, is 40:05
approved by agents, how do we kind of 40:07
prevent this exploding error problem 40:09
while still allowing these models to 40:11
grow and evolve? My bet is that pretty 40:13
soon we're going to move into more of 40:16
the alpha zero style of training where 40:18
um you have a more traditional LLM 40:22
that's trained on all of the internet. 40:25
Um but but then the way to train the 40:27
next generation of it would be to give 40:30
it a reinforcement learning environment 40:33
where uh it's generating a lot of 40:36
problems and doing like selfplay where 40:37
it's solving these problems getting 40:40
feedback on them and doing it in this 40:42
like massively parallel way. I think 40:44
this is how we're going to get the next 40:46
generation of software agents. It's not 40:47
going to be trained on human code 40:49
because like you said there's not going 40:50
to be human code and so we have to solve 40:52
this otherwise 40:55
we'll plateau very hard. Hi. Um, I'm 40:57
quite interested in some of the systems 41:01
report uh support required for these 41:04
agents. Um, and I find the universal 41:06
package manager that you've released and 41:10
your use of Nyx quite interesting. And 41:12
you mentioned this um copy on write 41:14
snapshotting and and uh uh forking and 41:17
merging. Uh and I'm working on a similar 41:20
thing. 41:22
>> Well, you should come work out. 41:23
>> Uh I was wondering if any of this is 41:25
publicly available or something. I think 41:27
you might be thinking about open 41:28
sourcing. 41:29
>> Um yeah, I mean we open sourced uh some 41:30
of our package manager work. We're big 41:32
contributors to Nexos. So we use Nex OS 41:34
which is a transactional operating 41:37
system generator is the best way I can I 41:39
can describe it and and possibly the 41:41
file system stuff will well at minimum 41:44
talk about it but this is like active 41:46
active work right now. Um but yeah come 41:48
like intern at Replet and learn all this 41:52
stuff and then go build it yourself. 41:54
>> Thank you. All right. Thank you 41:56
everyone. 41:58

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[English]
I was asked to talk about the future of
software. So, a lot of this talk is
going to be about what we're doing at
Replet, where we think the future of
software is headed and some kind of
trying to make some predictions or try
to think out loud about really what the
future holds. my mental model for for
our business and really for the moment
we're in today. If you think back uh uh
on the future on the history of
computing, mainframes were kind of the
the first mainstream computing devices
as mainstream as it gets back then. And
to use a mainframe, you needed to be an
expert. And then PCs came around and
initially PCs were kind of toys. you
bought a Mac and you did Mac Paint and
things like that. There wasn't real
business use case. I mean, people like
made fun of Apple at the time
uh until the Excel sheet. The Excel
sheet was the first software that was
actually useful on computers. And now
PCs run world economy. Like they
actually if you go at a data center,
it's also only PCs. It's x86 computers.
So you go you go from something that was
used by a small group of experts that
had to to have a lot of training to
something that started sort of as a toy
and is used by by everyone. Same thing
with software engineering like uh the
modern software engineering career you
can sort of trace it back to the u 70s
with the rise of maybe uh uh Unix and
the C programming language. That's when
people started uh kind of being trained
to become software engineers. You still
needed four, five, six years of uh educ
college education. You need another two
or three years of uh training on the job
to be able to actually do the job very
well. I think today software is going
through the same transition
from something that only experts do
to something that anyone can do.
And this is what we're really rep uh
building replet for. I've been working
at Replet for like almost nine years
now. And our vision has always been to
solve programming to like make
programming so make it so that anyone
can uh write software. So we built um an
IDE, we built uh language runtimes, we
built like a online sandbox environment,
we built deployments, we built cloud
services around all of that. And then
when AI came on the scene, we realized
that the ultimate expression of our
mission is to make it so that you don't
have to code. code is the sort of
bottleneck to actually getting a lot
more people making software. So around,
you know, late 23, early 24, we decided
to put all our resources into agents. At
the time, agents sort of barely worked,
but you could tell by looking at a few
benchmarks that were headed there. So,
SWEBench is a software engineering
benchmark. Uh it is basically a
collection of um issues on on GitHub
from major repositories and the unit
tests and pull requests sort of end
state of those issues and uh and the way
you test an agent is you put in an
environment and have it solve some of
those issues. You could tell like in in
22 sort of it barely worked. 23 started
sort of working and you could tell early
sort of early 24 where we're on this
trend where you could tell that software
engineering is getting automated or like
big parts of software engineering is
getting automated. Uh and now we're
probably I think this is like a little
outdated. We're like at 70 80%
Sweetbench. Now if this benchmark gets
saturated doesn't mean that we automated
all of software engineering but we're on
on our way to make really useful
arguably it's already here really useful
software engineering agents and by the
way this is true of any agent if any any
of you are building sort of agents
startups uh just like
really believe that it's coming really
really like I I keep telling my team we
need to be okay with building crappy
products today
because two months down the line the
models will get better and your business
your product will suddenly become
viable. So to today's kind of the moment
for for uh for agents so rapid kind of
went all in on agents but agents that
can write code uh is actually the easy
part. The hard part is the
infrastructure around it. Sometimes I
call it the habitat for which the agent
uh lives in. So what you need is you
need a a virtual machine, ideally in the
cloud, ideally not on your computer
because you know agents can actually
also mess up your computer. They could
do a lot of scary things. So it needs to
be sandboxed. Uh it needs to be
scalable. If you're running a product
like Replet, you need to be able to, you
know, scale up to like millions of users
and uh you need to be able to support
every language out there, every uh
package out there. Um the way uh
software engineering agents are trained
today is they're trained on standard
Linux environment. They need to be able
to use the shell. They need to be able
to write to files, read files. Uh but
they also need to able to install
packages either system level packages,
Linux packages, but also language
packages. And many cases agents want to
actually use more programming languages.
And so a lot of environments today where
people are trying to build agents are
very constrained. But what you what you
want is an environment as open as
possible similar to the kind of
environments that software engineers
work in. So what kind of other things
you need to ship real software you need
deployments, you need databases. Uh
really think about everything you do as
a software engineer and all those tools
need to be accessible uh to software
engineering agents. So actually I saw
earlier today if you were at uh
Karpathy's talk he he talked about how
you know the the coding part is the easy
part. So sort of similar to the points
I'm making but he talked about all the
different things that are really
unsolved but in reality we actually
solved a lot of them. So replet of the
gate comes with o uh agents are actually
not very good authentication. It's
better to use a service built-in
service. So replet actually one line of
code we turn on co uh off. So when ask
replet agent to integrate off uh it will
actually just use replet off. It will
just like basically turn on setting and
and then uh you have user authentication
you have user management those users
information are being stored in the
database. You can also obviously deploy
the app you can uh link a domain to it.
We have secrets management secure ways
of kind of uh using API keys. We have
background jobs. You know, a lot of
applications need to be able to run
continuously in the background,
especially in this era of agents.
Storage again, uh, you know, agents need
to be able to store things. They need to
be able to grab things from the web,
images, documentation, whatever, and
store them for the application to use
them in the future. Few other things on
the road map, universal model access.
So, it's really a pain right now to ask
the model to like to ask for an
application that can generate an that
can do something with an images or
videos. You have to figure out which
model to use. You have to go get an API
key and do all of that. Pretty soon, any
model that you ask for at Replet, it'll
be just available in your app directly.
We'll handle the the billing and the API
integration, all of that. Payments is
very important. Payments not just for
your users to pay for your application.
Say you're you're building a startup on
Replet. You're you're an entrepreneur.
you obviously need to collect uh user
payments, but also I think some sometime
in the future you would want your agent
to have some kind of wallet to be able
to go uh pay for services. So let's say
you know your your agent decides that it
needs a Tulio integration and replet or
whatever system you're using doesn't
have a tool integration, it should be
able to go put in its credit card and
provision that service in the in the
background. A more radical idea is that
your agent needs to be able to like hire
people. For example, if it hits a
capture and it doesn't know how to solve
a capture, it should go and task grab it
and ask a human to go solve the capture
for it. Whatever it is, there's a lot of
tasks that you still need humans for and
you would want your your agent to be
able to uh to have money to pay for
services. And similarly, agent to agent.
Um, you would want your agent to be able
to go on the on the market and find
other agents that can it can hire. Too
many YC startups are building uh agents
sort of agents for accounting, agents
for sales and so you need your software
engineering agents to be able to
integrate those agents as well. So it's
so I I know a lot of people think of MCP
as such an agent to agent tool but
actually MCP is a more traditional RPC
protocol. So it's not really going to
solve this. Another model on our sort of
business or technology is think about
sort of the level of autonomy. So when I
started working on what Replet would
become like years ago, perhaps decades
ago, the state-of-the-art code assist
was a language server, right? That's
IntelliSense if you're using VS Code.
And you can think of it as level one
autonomy. You know, if you think about
the uh sort of drive assist in
self-driving cars or like in cars, you
know, would be kind of the lane assist,
that would be the first level. Uh AI
code completion co-pilot, that would be
level two. Uh level three is what we
worked on um when agent when replet
agent first launched. Agent v2 I I would
call it almost 3.5. It can work up to 10
15 minutes on its own but it still needs
your input every now and then to test
the app and make sure the app is
working. And right now we're working on
V3. I'll talk a little bit more about V3
in a second. Uh but V3 is sort of level
four, right? Like you're almost there.
It still needs some of your attention,
but it it kind of works fully uh
autonomously.
Bore Plus, which I assume we're going to
get to in the next couple of years, you
can really spin up a thousand agents,
give them a lot thousand problems and
and reliably be confident that like 95%
of them is going to work. Like we're
going to have a really high reliability
rate. any kind of engineer or product
manager really anyone can spin up
hundreds if not thousands of engineers
to do work on their behalf. So they need
very little supervision and therefore
you can uh increase your impact
exponentially as as a as a programmer.
So what we're working on right now with
uh Asian v3 is uh that you know it's
based on uh basically three uh three
pillars. One is uh end to-end testing.
So today computer use is um so in models
what's called computer use if you've
used openi operator it's the idea that
models can go into a computer you know
click around and use a computer like a
human does they're slow they're
expensive they're not very good but this
is what I talked about earlier you want
to build a product at the edge of what's
possible right now the edge of what's
possible is like computer use in my opin
is really at the frontier of what these
models could do and I think over the
next 3 to 6 months they're going to get
a lot better and it's going to enable an
entire new market and also probably
start to automate a lot of real jobs
once we have app testing uh you know
this this kind of annoying thing that
replication does where keeps ask asking
you to do QA for it'll start doing QA on
its own and that will allow it to work
you know 30 40 up to hour maybe two
hours of work. Sort of the hype today is
test time compute. If you think about
the sort of 03 uh or like oer models or
deepseek R1 the kind of main insight
there is the more tokens the model is
able to consume or produce
uh the more intelligent uh it gets. Now
today with something like 03 the model
is generating a lot of tokens and trying
to reason but a lot of it is sort of
synopsistic. It doesn't get feedback
from the environment. It's almost like
it's just sitting in place and thinking.
What you'd want in a real computer
environment is for the model to generate
hypothesis and test its hypothesis in
real time. So at Replet, we built a uh
fully transactional reversible uh file
system. So when you're on on Replet,
every edit you make to the file system
is an atomic snapshot in time. And that
allows us to have very cheap copy and
write forks of the file system. And so
our idea for this is that um anytime
there's a tough problem or basically if
you have a lot of budget you can have it
on all the time but every time the agent
is making a big change it forks itself
and the environment in number of times
to solve this problem in different ways
and then find the best solution and then
take that solution merge it into the
main branch.
So think about you know the idea of
simulations like when you're thinking
about the problem you're often
simulating different branches of things
that you could do you have different
hypothesis you want to test and so we
want to also
uh give agents the ability to do that.
So at any given problem generating a ton
of different ways of doing it and then
testing all of them in parallel. This
will bring up reliability of agents by I
think two to three folds. So that's
sampling and simulations. And then
finally is uh for the uh model to be
able to generate tests for every feature
that it creates. Today replet replet
agent often creates a feature and then
later on breaks that feature but also
true of clot code and cursor and all the
others. So we want to make it so that
once the agent makes a set of changes or
feature, it always has tests that it
runs on every change to make sure it's
not breaking the software. This is
actually harder than it sounds like it
sounds like okay write tests and let's
run them. But often actually models are
pretty bad at generating unit tests. So
there's still a lot of work uh to do
there. It needs to be fast as well so so
that it happens on every change. So I so
that's what we're working on with V3.
That's a lot of infrastructure work.
Want to create the best habitat for
agents to to live in and be able to u
the most be the most reliable possible.
But like let's fast forward to like what
I talked about with like level five
autonomy. Really the most autonomous
system we can think of.
>> YC's next batch is now taking
applications. Got a startup in you?
Apply at y combinator.com/apply.
It's never too early and filling out the
app will level up your idea. Okay, back
to the video.
>> My prediction is that all application
software will go to zero. In other
words, software will be dirt cheap, that
no one will be making money on the
traditional type of SAS software. I'm
not saying this will happen tomorrow or
even next year. I gave up on the the um
trying to predict timelines. I know it's
going to happen on the order of years.
If anyone with one prompt can generate
any kind of software of any type of
complexity, then um the value of
applications will go down to almost
zero. So what does that actually look
like? So today you know in the startup
ecosystem in the tech ecosystem there's
all these generic generic SAS you know
vertical SAS software and any of you
who's running a small business or even a
bigger business you you probably have
bought you know dozens and dozens of SAS
software just to uh just to run your
business even today you're able to
replace large parts of those software by
using something like replet agent or
writing your own software uh I think in
the next few years. This again this will
go from uh you know maybe 15%
replaceable to 100% replaceable. So this
will really fundamentally change the
software market. Uh just to give you a
story uh one of our colleagues at Replet
uh Kelsey was uh she works in HR uh
she's never written a line of software
in her in her life and she wanted an
orchar software. She had a few bespoke
needs like she wanted to connect it to
ADP, our our sort of payroll software
and and she had a few features that that
she wanted and she went on the market
and she couldn't really find an org shot
software that exactly fits her needs.
They were very expensive that were going
to cost tens of thousands of dollars a
year. So she decided to make it. She
took a week, less than a week, three
days, and she made orshot software that
we're using today that we can go out on
the market and sell it as a SAS product
for tens of thousands of dollars a year.
So that's like mind-blowing, right? I
mean, it's HR professional can make
software to run their work. That's
happening today. Try to project that out
a couple years later. Like the software
business fundamentally changes, gets
disrupted. Not only software but I think
how we work, how businesses works, how
corporations work will will
fundamentally change.
Today
we have these roles you know uh
companies like to specialize since the
industrial revolution when factories you
know became the main mode of creation.
the sort of modern uh special, you know,
specialization in the economy kind of
emerged where one person is making one
part of the the the product. It goes on
a factory sort of um assembly line and
another person is responsible for
testing it, another person responsible
for assembling it. And so this this um
specialization has been the way the
economy has been trending for a long
time. And it sort of makes sense, right?
You want to uh specialize people as much
as possible. You want them to be as as
replaceable as possible. And so this is
how the modern economy is built. But
once your HR professional is also a
software engineer is also potentially a
marketer is also potentially anything
because they can learn anything. There
are AI agents that can do anything for
them. really, you know, you go into the
world where jobs will become less
specialized, less um siloed. And in
fact, we started, we're seeing it today
and we're at Replet the way we're
structuring our orchard and our business
based on this idea. We're building for
the first time, we're building a like a
actual product team, product management
team. And our product team is actually
made of designers, engineers, and
product managers all almost always in
the same person.
So we're trying to merge a lot of roles
together and create this generalist
employee. So the the arch will start to
look more like a network than a
hierarchy. So it'll look more like an
open source project than a than uh it
will look like a traditional company
hierarchy with a marketing department,
sales department. Every employee will
like wake up in the morning and their
mandate would not be write this
marketing email or you know make this uh
optimize this button. Their mandate
would be make the business work,
generate value for the business. So
everyone is sort of an entrepreneur and
that will really disrupt and
fundamentally change how companies work.
It's a model that really we haven't you
no one has really embraced or or or even
started to talk about but really you
know think it through if everyone has
access to a general purpose software
engineering agent and sort of agent for
every possible role obviously domain
expertise is still important but is not
as important as it used to be. It's
exponentially less important and this
also affects how people build
businesses. it affects the opportunities
that are available for us in the future.
One uh really interesting book uh that I
read this book is was written in the 80s
which is insane given how good the
predictions were. So I'm just going to
read this. Ideas will become wealth.
merits wherever it arises will be
rewarded as never before. In an
environment where the greatest source of
wealth will be the ideas you have in
your head rather than the physical
capital alone, anyone who thinks clearly
will potentially be rich. The
information age will be the age of
upward mobility. The brightest, most
successful and ambitious of these will
emerge as truly sovereign individuals.
Now, some of these various is a bit
dated. The information age perhaps we
call the intelligence age today.
But this book predicted things like uh
crypto, remote work, all sorts of things
like that. And this idea of like a
sovereign individual, someone so uh
empowered by technology, so empowered by
these uh uh agents
uh that is able to create enormous
amount of wealth uh individually is is
uh is is going to be the norm. Think
think about um someone like Satoshi.
Satoshi created a single person created
a trillion dollars worth of value. I
don't know what the market cap exactly.
Perhaps it's more than trillion dollars
of Bitcoin. But like that's a single
person. They wrote the paper. They wrote
the software. They put it out there and
it became a big thing. Obviously there's
a lot of people. It's a big market right
now. But it was created by a single
person and we don't know who they are.
And I think that's going to be a common
occurrence in the future. The really
great thing about it is really um the
access to opportunity will be universal.
The idea of merit being rewarded
wherever it arises doesn't matter if
you're in Silicon Valley or anywhere
else in the world. If you can think
clearly and you can use some of this
technology. If you can think clearly and
generate good ideas, go into replet, put
in those ideas, make the first version
of software today, you can start to
become more like the sovereign
individual. Again, the way collaboration
work will be will be seamless. You know,
everyone's talking about the you know $1
billion single person company, but I
think that really kind of misses the
point a little bit. What's really
interesting about it is that you'll be
able to assemble groups of people really
quickly. You'll also be a be able to
assemble uh groups of agents really
quickly. You'll be able to assemble
these companies and also unwind them.
You can create mission purpose, you
know, companies or like projects and
unwind them really quickly. And in some
cases it could happen in a day or two.
And sometimes you might be you might
think you're working with another human
on the internet, but they're actually an
agent built by someone else who's out
there doing work for them. So the way we
work uh and the way people build
startups will fundamentally change as
the the cost of transaction goes down
goes down to zero then um the the the
reason to hire an employee full-time
uh you'll have less of a reason to hire
full-time employees. So think about um
like getting an Uber today. The
transaction cost the kind of effort of
getting an Uber is just one button on
your phone. I think the same thing will
be in the future to to get a developer
whether it's a software agent or another
human being. Uh it'll be just like one
button. I want this problem solved.
You'll be able to maybe your agent will
be able to go find and interview a lot
of different people or agents on the
internet and be able to find the best uh
thing to solve that problem. And um and
so you'll be able to like build
businesses really at the speed of light.
Now you know I I I talked about how kind
of application software goes to zero.
That doesn't mean that all software goes
to zero. Today you know rapid agent or
others the way it works is the agent
makes a piece of software the user uses
the software to solve problems. You can
think of those things as intermediate
steps. Instead,
agents can just solve problems.
And and for Replet, and I'm sure a lot
of other businesses to survive, at some
point, Replet needs to stop being
focused on making applications
and start being focused on solving
problems with software. So, I want to
leave ample time for for questions. So,
I'll I'll I'll end here and open it up.
>> My name is Chinat from Stanford. Nice to
meet you. My first question is in this
future do you see there potentially
humans engaging with multiple agents or
will there be a unilateral agent and if
in the case of like multiple agents um
how would we deal with the fragmentation
of like data memory and context across
all these different agents
>> I think multiple agents uh and and the
reason I think that's true is because
let's let's say I'm someone with true
unique domain expertise
uh let's say I'm I'm a lawyer who is top
in the world at solving certain um
cases that that are very rare. And so I
have this domain expertise that I'm not
going to share in the open source. I'm
not going to sell to scale AI so that
they can sell to to OpenAI or Google all
of those. I'm just going to keep this
resource to myself. But the way I would
monetize it instead of myself going and
selling my services directly, I would
like imbue this knowledge into an agent
that becomes this very specialized agent
in this very specialized domain and then
I can scale myself. uh and so so I think
I think people will be building these
agents to work on their behalf and then
um there's going to be agents that that
uh go out there and assembles these
teams of agents uh and then there's
going to be obviously software
development agents and maybe there's and
maybe you're running all all this
through chat GPT or whatever main
interface you have but I think it's
going to be a multi- aent world with
different contacts similar that we have
in the world today. When I go to a
lawyer, I need to give them my context.
So, uh, and maybe there are protocols
and this is why they talked about how
MCP really doesn't solve the agent to
Asian problem. I think there needs to be
more interesting protocols in this space
that and maybe this is a startup someone
builds.
>> Hi, thank you for the insightful talk.
My question is as follows. in the not so
far off future where we're going to have
AI systems that can automate most if not
all of meaningful physical and cognitive
tasks and there's increasing delegation
to agents that work on your behalf and
talk to other agents that are working on
other people's behalf then what is left
for humans to do or like what will our
human condition look like because our
physical and cognitive aspects can all
be done by intelligences
>> I I think it fundamentally
depends on your
worldview and belief of the limits of AI
versus the
uniqueness and premacy of what humans
can do. So it becomes a bit of a
religious discussion but my view is
there's something special about humans
and my view is that there's a
fundamental limitation with how we do AI
today and maybe this gets solved but AI
today can't truly generalize out of
distribution
everything AI can do h needs to be
represented in the data say I go back to
this example of this lawyer that is
expert in the world at very rare cases
uh again this is something that no one
else knows how to do uh or can do or
whenever there's like a truly novel
problem, truly novel case, you still
need human ingenuity
um to solve that problem. And so I think
humans will be more in the creative seat
and I think agents can be creative as
well but their type of creativity are
not net new knowledge. It's more like
about uh which is a lot of what
creativity is bringing a lot of
different things together. And so but
but this idea of like ideas become
wealth uh is um is what gets really
exciting about it is like people can
generate novel ideas and test them out
really quickly which you know I don't
think we're going to get to a to a point
where you can go tell an agent hey go
find me a you know business idea and go
test all of them. I don't think we'll
get there anytime soon. Thanks for your
talk. I've been following Replet for
many years and that's actually where I
learned how to code as well was on
Replet. So you mentioned the value of
clear thinking and ideas being the
future. Do you see this as an argument
more towards a favor of a liberal arts
critical thinking model of education
instead of a more STEM uh skills-based
focus?
>> I don't I don't think they're mutually
exclusive, but I do think that the
liberal arts will become more valuable.
I I think today engineers
tend to be uh a little more parochial
than they can afford to be in the future
because you know what I shot what I
showed with the kind of the model for
what the future company could look like.
Everyone becoming more of a generalist.
I think today engineers can afford to
like not understand even the business
they're in. A lot of engineers are just
focused on very narrow domains. Uh so I
think people need to have a more broaden
worldview and set of skills. So um but I
don't think they're mutually exclusive.
I think
you know being being scientifically
minded I think is going to be important.
>> Hi. Yeah. Uh so I wanted I was more
curious as to uh where in the tech stack
like is replet making a lot of progress
because as you said uh replet can do
tasks which for for one hour and so
given that like replet uses probably
closed source models which have no
access to pre-training and post-
trainining uh where in the text are you
making that like amazing uh kind of
innovation? that gets your models to
work auton autonomously for like an
hour.
>> It's what I was calling the habitat of
the model. So, you know, the um the
commercial models can train really great
models. They can train them to be as
autonomous as they as as possible to be
coherent over a long period of time. But
uh us or really any um agent company
needs to be able to provide the
infrastructure for for that agent to to
exist in. And so all these components
that I talked about. So one really
crucial thing about replet is this idea
of uh you could call it trans uh being
being transactional or atomic. every
mutation to the replet computer
environment
happen in sync with every other uh
component of the system. So right now in
replet if you go to your history you can
see previous checkpoints and you can
actually go to any one of them and
reboot the application in that state and
so we think that infrastructure is going
to be really crucial for how to make um
the models more more reliable. I think
there's a limit on how much the training
can increase reliability,
but I think the environment feedback and
the ability to try things really fast is
the way to get to the upper echelon of
reliability. So that's what we're
focused on.
>> Hi. So you talk about the generalist
employee and how that's the sort of
future of um companies. I I to I totally
agree with this vision, but where I find
myself stuck is finding roles today that
set me up for that kind of future. what
what kind of opportunities should we
look out for? What kind of positions
should we look out for in startups, in
companies that would prepare us with the
skills that are necessary in order to be
a generalist good employee five five
years down the line when that finally
becomes a thing. I know being a founder
is one option but
um not all of us want to take that
career plunge immediately. Uh some of us
want to work with other people, build
teamwork skills and learn all of those
other things as well. How do we go about
that? Jo join startups as early as
possible. Like obviously you can think
of it of it as um sort of exponentially
decaying uh curve where like being the
first being the founder you get the most
generalist experience being the you know
first employee and then by the time you
get to the hund I don't know like to the
maybe 100th employee you're sort of like
you're not getting as much of that
journalist experience but like just join
as early as you can depending on your
risk risk profile and and all of that.
But even like number 20 at a like a
series B company, I think you will get a
lot more experience than at a at a fang
or something like that. Even if you join
that startup, you need to be seeking
those generalist opportunities. So don't
sit there waiting for people to give you
tasks. Have that mindset of I'm waking
up in the morning. I'm not looking at a
to-do list. I'm looking at a mission.
and my mission is to make this company
succeed or be more valuable.
>> Um, hi, my name is Shivam. I also wanted
to ask about the one hour of autonomous
like agent development. Uh, specifically
like could you like elaborate a little
more on how like you and your team
approach how long of a time horizon is
worth pursuing as opposed to improving
reasoning for shorter time horizons. So,
so I think the what you're talking about
with shorter time horizons is more like
uh let's um let's work on reliability
um and then longer time horizons like
let's work on autonomy um removing the
human in the loop and the burden of the
human to continue to test and give
feedback. Um so we're doing both. When
I'm talking about reliability, this is
more investing in reasoning and more
investing in this parallel agent.
um trial and error that I was talking
about while we're calling sampling and
simulations.
And then for uh long horizon, it's more
about testing,
making sure that because as you go
longer, the there's like an there's a
like a gold drift. The the agent might
start doing things that you don't like,
but having those guard rail rails of of
testing along the way uh will make it so
that it stays more coherent uh over
time. And then as we collect more data
about what fails and what doesn't work,
you can either uh like go and fine-tune
that or you can just like continue to
improve the prompts uh and add more
guard guardrails to to make it better.
So I think both are important.
>> Hi, I'm Sophia. Um have been thankful
for your talk and I've been following
you met at AI for developers when you
were talking about ghostriter and the
work behind it. Um, but I'm curious to
hear more about how agents are kind of
over oversaturating
um, uh, certain set certain sectors and
um, whether or not that should kind of
you should consider that when you're uh,
working on them or joining a startup
that's working on something.
>> I think certainly software is like
really tricky. software engineering
agents. There's like there's a lot of
people that want to do that. And if
you're coming in late, you want to have
a truly novel idea to be able to like
compete there. But, you know, there's a
lot of things like who's who's building
the agent for HR or finance. Uh I know
one company's doing accounting. Uh
there's a lot of companies doing SDR for
whatever reason. That's very crowded.
What I would start with is what are you
interested in and what where do you have
domain knowledge? So the best way to
start an agent company is that if you
yourself
you're you yourself you're like a
compliance officer,
you start uh a a compliance officer or
you're passionate about compliance. I
don't know who's passionate about
compliance, but if you're passionate
about compliance, uh, go start an Asian
company because you're going to learn
the most about it and you're going to
have the most domain knowledge and
domain knowledge is the most important
thing to build an Asian company. Hey,
um, so if the cost of software and
building software is going to zero, then
by extension, the platforms which build
software like Replet,
like the value capture will be going
down to zero. So, how are you planning
to make money long term and how are you
going to compete with like the other
competitors like Bolton and lovable?
>> Yeah. Yeah. So, notice that I I said not
uh old software. I said like application
software specifically. So, I think
software will continue to run our lives
but a lot of it will be autonomous. So
for example, I build a lot of personal
software using Replet and a lot of it is
around managing my life and my family
and like you know uh doing a lot of
quantified self stuff a lot of like you
know data about my sleep and and and all
of that stuff and then I spent a lot of
time like plotting that data and doing
all of that stuff like instead I should
be able to tell replet agent here are my
goals you figure out what kind of
software that needs to that we built and
you figure out how to how to uh operate
it and you tell me what wearables I need
to buy and what um and and what do I
need to log in the morning, what do I
need to do and she'll be able to go make
the software
uh acquire the things that I need in my
home, what kind of sensors and then
solve the problem for me. I think I
think Replet needs to become a universal
problem solver for our company to
survive. And I think for a lot of the
others, you know, I I think it's
already, especially the companies that
you talk about in the prototyping space,
it's already getting really crowded
there. I think what replet where really
Replet excels today is the fact that
it's full stack. It can go from idea to
a deployed and scaled software.
>> Hi, uh my name is Emma and I'm really
intrigued by your vision of this future
where all code is written by agents. But
I'm also kind of concerned because there
is this kind of known problem where if
you train a generative model on data
that is generated by another model, you
get an issue of like accumulating error,
accumulating noise. So my question is in
this future where code is written by
agents, it's tested by agents, is
approved by agents, how do we kind of
prevent this exploding error problem
while still allowing these models to
grow and evolve? My bet is that pretty
soon we're going to move into more of
the alpha zero style of training where
um you have a more traditional LLM
that's trained on all of the internet.
Um but but then the way to train the
next generation of it would be to give
it a reinforcement learning environment
where uh it's generating a lot of
problems and doing like selfplay where
it's solving these problems getting
feedback on them and doing it in this
like massively parallel way. I think
this is how we're going to get the next
generation of software agents. It's not
going to be trained on human code
because like you said there's not going
to be human code and so we have to solve
this otherwise
we'll plateau very hard. Hi. Um, I'm
quite interested in some of the systems
report uh support required for these
agents. Um, and I find the universal
package manager that you've released and
your use of Nyx quite interesting. And
you mentioned this um copy on write
snapshotting and and uh uh forking and
merging. Uh and I'm working on a similar
thing.
>> Well, you should come work out.
>> Uh I was wondering if any of this is
publicly available or something. I think
you might be thinking about open
sourcing.
>> Um yeah, I mean we open sourced uh some
of our package manager work. We're big
contributors to Nexos. So we use Nex OS
which is a transactional operating
system generator is the best way I can I
can describe it and and possibly the
file system stuff will well at minimum
talk about it but this is like active
active work right now. Um but yeah come
like intern at Replet and learn all this
stuff and then go build it yourself.
>> Thank you. All right. Thank you
everyone.

Key Vocabulary

Start Practicing
Vocabulary Meanings

run

/rʌn/

A1
  • verb
  • - to move quickly using feet
  • verb
  • - to operate or manage

work

/wɜːrk/

A1
  • verb
  • - to do a job or task

write

/raɪt/

A1
  • verb
  • - to put words on paper or screen

make

/meɪk/

A1
  • verb
  • - to create or produce

use

/juːz/

A1
  • verb
  • - to employ or apply

new

/nuː/

A1
  • adjective
  • - not existing before

big

/bɪg/

A1
  • adjective
  • - large in size

future

/ˈfjuːtʃər/

A2
  • noun
  • - time that has not yet come

build

/bɪld/

A2
  • verb
  • - to construct or create

start

/stɑːrt/

A2
  • verb
  • - to begin something

important

/ɪmˈpɔːrtənt/

A2
  • adjective
  • - having great value or significance

easy

/ˈiːzi/

A2
  • adjective
  • - not difficult

hard

/hɑːrd/

A2
  • adjective
  • - difficult or firm

software

/ˈsɔːftwɛr/

B1
  • noun
  • - computer programs and applications

solve

/sɒlv/

B1
  • verb
  • - to find a solution to a problem

create

/kriˈeɪt/

B1
  • verb
  • - to make something new

change

/tʃeɪndʒ/

B1
  • verb
  • - to make something different
  • noun
  • - process of becoming different
  • verb
  • - to replace

useful

/ˈjuːsfəl/

B1
  • adjective
  • - helpful and practical

agent

/ˈeɪdʒənt/

B2
  • noun
  • - a person or thing that acts or does business

code

/koʊd/

B2
  • noun
  • - programming instructions
  • verb
  • - to write programming instructions

“run, work, write” – got them all figured out?

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