replit employee here. the team who built this is very small (less than a dozen, including non-eng roles for the go to market), and went from idea to general availability in 8 weeks
That's very impressive. Hats off to them! I dont think this is too out of the ordinary either though. I'd guess they started off with a LLM from hugging face, set up some pipeline to ingest code from replit repos to finetune the LLM. The ML aspect of this is not terribly hard given that they probably dont need to train a LLM from scratch. Figuring out how store and serve from replit repos (or publicly available code bases) is not too difficult. From there it's a matter of productionalizing: how to serve the model in real time, figuring out they want the product to look/feel like and I suppose this part of it might take a while. I'd estimate you'd need 1-2 ML engineers, 2 data engineers, 2-3 swes, 1 PM for the team for a minimal viable product.
yep, true! however, the devil is in the details. from what i've been told, the big challenge was latency: they worked a lot to bring the latency down to acceptable levels - essentially to be usable in a cloud IDE
iirc the team managed to bring it to a lever an order of magnitude lower than off-the-shelf models
8 weeks is impressive for something like that, and it goes to show just how powerful our off-the-shelf tools have become.
I think it's also a bit scary, because 8 weeks is very little time for testing, tuning, and validation of something as opaque as a machine learning model. If it worked right the first time, that's great. But there is still a lot of inherent uncertainty in ML projects. Decision makers need to take that uncertainty into account when planning.
That, or, the 8 weeks only covers the final training runs and the implementation/deployment, and doesn't include time spent developing and tuning proof-of-concept prototype models.
Interesting, sithlord is an anagram for shitlord. While the behavior of the CEO wasn't cool, the issue seems to have been resolved between all involved parties and everyone has moved on - we don't need to bring it up every time repl.it is mentioned.
This is the type of thing where goodwill is burned and it takes time to earn it back. I don't think we just brush it under a rug either. In my opinion, you don't just get to "resolve it" and then everyone forgets about it. For me, future decisions and importantly, actions, will help me personally move past this and "move on" as you say.
Ok, sounds good about it taking time - assuming perfect behavior, how long will it be before you stop referencing the affair whenever an unrelated repl.it story comes up?
I feel like, if there's ANYTHING we have learned in the past decade or two it's that people who defend a company tend to be doing so for the wrong reasons. See Sony or Microsoft, or Apple or Android, etc. Defending a company is just weird.
I look at replit as a tool, run by people. The tool might be cool, but the CEO made a bad decision and now I judge the product on that CEOs actions. There's no definitive time frame or action that just magically makes it better.
But in general, I'll stop thinking about the stupid actions of the CEO when my brain stops reminding me "Oh, no matter how cool this is, the actions of the CEO were incredibly poor." When will that be? No idea, but maybe sometime down the road he does enough good things that I will suddenly stop and think "cool, looking back, he's done enough good that I can probably forget about the poor decision he made and start looking at this again, because he's proven he isn't that one stupid action."
Goodwill is earned, it's not simply given. It's often hard won, but incredibly easy to lose.
I mean, I think it's relevant still. My time to move on from this particular instance might be different than someone else's, and there may be people out there that did not hear about that particular story. Personally, I feel everyone should have the opportunity to make their own decision on what I believe are poor actions made by a company.
We do it every day, whether we realize it or not. As a people we should support the companies that do good, and we should be aware of the companies doing bad. There's room for grey in there, it's not a one size fits all. But if you aren't aware of the bad then you aren't informed in your decision making.
If it bothers you, sorry. But I see it as a pro. I had a really bad experience with Remarkable, every time it comes up, I point out my experience so that others who might be making their own decision can use my experience in their decision making. When a company performs poorly. I guess by the metric you've provided above, this would be a low effort comment by your definition.
The CEO's actions are a reflection of the company. I'm not sure I "care more about it" than I am simply aware of their past actions when making decisions on whether to use their product or not.
I'll admit, every time I hear of repl.it mentioned, I think of the time the CEO threatened the intern. The CEO did a huge disservice to himself and the company that day in my mind
Looks like this CEO isn't of good character after all. He looks almost like a jerk when looking at the end of the story. Even in his last email he tried to get his (obviously wrong) point. He never apologized for the things that mattered most, only tried to extinguish the social media fire all in all.
Big LOL here! The abstract things are the simplest, yeah! That's why progress in something like math or theoretical physics is made by the dumbest people, in contrast to something like sociology where you need genius level of intelligence to come up with some new ideas. Sure, sure.
But that's of course not everything this dude got completely backwards.
Would explain why replit is the most useless of all the online IDEs: It has no direction, no true value proposition. It's not a good cloud coding environment. It never was a good code snippet playground (actually one of the worsts). Now they even require accounts, so the quick code snippet aspect is also gone. Also they badly positioned in the education space…
Of course I wish them luck!
But I guess they have no chance against something like Gitpod, Github, or OpenShift codespaces, which are light-years ahead.
OK, maybe the exit-strategy is "just" to be visible enough that at some point they get bought by one of the above. (Which doesn't look like the most ethical thing to do ;-)).
To me (programmer in Sweden) the largest single team I've been on was 14 people and that was _very_ large (indeed the largest in the tech department). We actually broke ourselves up into two more informal groups since we thought that was a more manageable team size.
Neat feature but yeah very small doesn’t seem like < 12 to me either (worked at big tech for a while). A two pizza team (standard amazon size) is 8-10, 12 starts to be on the larger size for a single team, but not abnormal. Very small to me would be if a team of 2-4 shipped it. Replit must be much larger then I expected for a startup.
can i get a clarification - when it says "in-browser" i hear "on-device" as in it doesnt call back to replit to get the predictions. i assume that's inaccurate?
for cost/compute purposes i'm wondering how small models have to get in order to run "truly in browser"
