Building with Replit Agent v2

A new frontier in AI coding

Hey, I’m Colin! I help PMs and business leaders improve their technical skills through real-world case studies. For more, check out my live courses, Technical Foundations and AI Prototyping.

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I wrote two sentences in a text box and got a functioning Reddit clone in return in less than 5 minutes. As someone who uses these tools daily, I can tell you I’ve never had a remotely similar experience so far.

AI coding is here to stay.

New Replit Agent + Sonnet 3.7

The new Replit agent gives us a peek into the future of software development. Today, we have to ask AI the right questions and closely monitor its progress. Agent v2 can build simple applications with a prompt like ‘Build me a simple reddit clone’.

Replit Agent building my reddit clone

This is powered by both a new UI, as well as Sonnet 3.7 under the hood. Sonnet 3.7 introduced reasoning to the Sonnet model, allowing the AI to create a plan prior to implementing changes. This is the primary recommendation I give when using AI prototyping tools and it’s not hard to see this advice will be short lived.

For now, you still need some technical knowledge to muddle through errors and ask the right questions, but I think the gap between technical and non-technical users will close quickly. This is both extremely exciting and somewhat terrifying for anyone who is making software today.

Demo: Building a Reddit Clone

As an example, I decided to replicate Reddit. I started with a simple prompt – Build me a reddit clone.

From this initial prompt, Replit implemented:

• The home page

• Communities

• Creating a post, with multiple post types

• A basic user settings and logout component

• Search

• Filters

Output of prompt #1

The initial iteration did have some problems. My posts didn’t load, and I was unable to create a new post. I provided a quick follow up - “I cant create a post, and it appears that there is an error loading posts”.

From here, Replit went down a winding road to attempt to identify and resolve the error.

At the end of its journey, the bug was fixed (without me having any understanding of what it just did)

Output of prompt #2

We now have a functional Reddit clone, with posts, upvotes, comments, and more.

Replit Agent v2 isn’t perfect. It still makes mistakes, and it can consume a ton of tokens very quickly. But oh my god – this is the first time I feel like I can see the future.

Just remember that many of these tools were released less than 6 months ago. Now, imagine where these tools will be in 12 months or 2 years. I can’t help but think that regular consumers will be able to create whatever software they want, when they want it.

A brave new world.