Everyone is talking about AI taking over first jobs, then the world.
- https://shumer.dev/something-big-is-happening
- https://www.citriniresearch.com/p/2028gic
- https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/technology/tech-news/ibm-stock-suffers-worst-single-day-drop-in-25-years-over-anthropics-cobol-tool-what-it-is-and-why-it-wiped-billions-of-dollar-for-ibm/articleshow/128744951.cms
- https://www.moneycontrol.com/news/business/stocks/nifty-it-index-crashes-nearly-3-as-anthropic-s-ai-claims-fuel-disruption-fears-tcs-infosys-among-top-losers-13840666.html
- And so on…
I read these, debated some of these things with friends, and worried some. But all this was stuff happening to “them”, not to “me”. My team in Remiges has begun using Cursor, Claude, and Lovable heavily, and the results are quite amazing. But the extent of the paradigm shift didn’t hit home till I heard about this friend and what he’d done.
This friend is in his 50s, and has been a serial entrepreneur for most of his life. He’s headed a global hardware trading giant with GMV of billions of USD/year, he’s run lending organisations, he’s done dot-com startups. He’s very energetic and sharp. Now he’s running a business which does car financing plus a few added things, and has a hundred or so employees. He’s never written a line of code in any language.
His company has been using an online SaaS HR service for some time, and they have lots of complaints about it. He decided to write an entire HR portal, to see if he could replace that SaaS service. So he first tried Lovable, didn’t like it much, then went to Replit and asked the site to create an application for him. He deliberately kept the specifications vague — just six sentences. He wanted to see if Replit would know what to do.
Replit did. Replit made useful suggestions about how an HR portal will need holiday lists which are segregated by geography, and proceeded to incorporate those into the specs. It also made many other suggestions, some of which had never occurred to my friend. And then it proceeded to generate the application, with a beautiful UI.
My friend did this over two weeks, in his spare time, working long nights on this pet project, and running his business during the day.
Finally, he handed it over to his team, and over the next month or two, they used the portal, and loved it. They are now in the process of ditching the commercial HR SaaS service. My friend does not need any IT or DevOps team to host the new portal — Replit does it.
Then came the app. His business needs a car seller to post a car for sale using an app. The app is supposed to help the seller click photos, upload the details of the car, etc. My friend had a vendor who was maintaining the app, with a small team of developers. He decided to get the app done through Replit. He got it done over some three days, working late nights. Once again, he did not give detailed specs. Once again, Replit brought features into the app which were not anticipated, like the intelligence to evaluate the photo the car owner was clicking and telling him (the owner) to click the photo again because there was too much glare from the windscreen or because he was standing too far away from the car, etc. Replit also brought in data from some master database of car makes and models, and the app therefore asks the user to choose his make and model from a drop-down list. Where did the data for the drop-down list come from? God knows. My friend certainly doesn’t know. In effect, the new Replit-created app is functionally better than his old one. Replit published it to Google Play Store, and the app is now live.
This is reality. This has happened. Not only did my friend not have any coding skills (therefore he can’t bother with code quality), he also did not write a 100-page spec document. You may disbelieve this all you want, but I’ve known my friend for about 20+ years now, and I’ve worked with him on one or two projects. The question of doubting the truth of the story does not arise for me.
Replit did not stop there. After the app was done, Replit created a 10-page PDF document describing the app, which can now be given to car dealers who can read it and decide whether they want to come on board my friend’s service. Replit also created a pitch deck — a PPT file. This pitch deck is for investors. Replit decided to assign a value of USD 10 million to my friend’s business, and put that value in the pitch deck. My friend can now send the PPT around to investors if he feels like.
Anyone who is not re-evaluating application development from first principles is walking the plank.
(Written purely with my natural, biological intelligence. No LLM was harmed in the writing of this article.)
(Also published at https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/tale-ai-rather-close-home-shuvam-misra-zshff/)
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