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How did we all code before we had AI?
A look at everything going on in the world of Replit.
It’s been a busy month since Replit dropped Agent v2 and I’m going to try and cover it in this slightly stripped-down version of the newsletter going forward.
First off, let’s look at some of the smaller changes.
This week in Replit:
1/ Configurable history retention for Neon databases—manage your costs more effectively.
2/ Live previews of link content (taking screenshots and scraping text) in both Assistant and Agent, now available on Mobile too. Type a link in the prompt box to… x.com/i/web/status/1…
— matt palmer (@mattppal)
11:26 PM • Mar 14, 2025
Replit is good at design now
Imo, Replit lacked on the design front, but that’s all changed with Agent v2. Prompted (or not) to build with React and shadcn and it’ll knock out something quite decent now - and do it quickly!
The first thing Agent now does with any build is sketch out the front-end design so you can see what’s coming.
Replit Agent v2 design is looking 🥵
— Amjad Masad (@amasad)
1:47 AM • Mar 17, 2025
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Back to (vibe) school
Replit’s Matt and Michele will be hosting a vibe coding with Replit course. Get yourself on the waitlist.
Talk-to-code?
If banging out apps in the form of barely understandable prompts even feels like too much work, now you can just talk to Replit and get it to build stuff for you.
Matt shows us how with Replit’s Wispr Flow integration.
Talk to your computer and make apps based on what you’re looking at
— Amjad Masad (@amasad)
1:46 AM • Mar 17, 2025
Assistant goes back to Sonnet 3.5
No word from the team on why, but it seems Assistant is back to using Sonnet 3.5.
This might actually be for the best because 3.7 (which still powers Agent) has a habit of going wildly off the rails adding features you’ve never even thought of, let alone asked for.
This usually works out well enough when Agent is building you a whole app, but Assistant is about the ninja updates and 3.5 works better for those.
Speaking of Assistant, you might not be aware but there are a bunch of customisable settings you can apply to make it easier to work with.
Here’s a guide.
JFK files on Github, anyone?
Tech-focussed amateur investigators pay attention - founder Amjad used Replit AI on his phone to OCR the recently-released JFK files into a Github project, so you can explore (and innovate?) with them.
JFK Files in Text
I used Replit AI on my phone to download the files, use Gemini Flash to OCR the pdf to convert to text files, and put it up on GitHub.
You can search directly on GitHub or download or use an LLM to analyze. Link in thread.
— Amjad Masad (@amasad)
2:09 AM • Mar 19, 2025
1 million apps built
And finally, Amjad was in Qatar recently to talk about all things Replit at the Web Summit. Check out his talk.
One nice tidbit he spoke about - 1 million apps built and a 100k deployed since Agent launched last year.
[fire emoji] [sunglasses emoji]