Amjad Masad grew up in Amman without reliable access to a computer. By the time he reached Silicon Valley — via a circuitous route through Facebook and Y Combinator — he had a fairly fixed idea about what was broken in software development: it was a priesthood, and most of its barriers to entry were artificial. Replit, the browser-based coding platform he founded in 2016, was his argument against that.
A decade on, Masad is a billionaire presiding over a $9 billion company, and the moment he has been building toward may finally be arriving. A new Forbes profile charts his journey and places Replit at the centre of what AI researcher Andrej Karpathy has called "vibe coding" — a style of development where you describe what you want in plain English and let an AI agent handle the rest.
"I want to enable the next hundred million developers," Masad told Forbes. "People who have never opened a terminal."
Replit's flagship product, Replit Agent, is the clearest expression of that ambition. Feed it a prompt and it will scaffold, write, debug, and deploy a full-stack application — no local environment required, no package manager to wrestle with. The pitch is aimed at non-technical founders, students, and domain experts who have product ideas but no engineering team to execute them: a deliberately different target from the professional developer market that rivals like Cursor, GitHub Copilot, and Codeium's Windsurf are competing for.
Whether that distinction holds is the central question facing the company. The gap between an AI-augmented code editor and a fully agentic development environment is closing fast, and well-capitalised competitors are converging on natural-language workflows from multiple directions. Replit's answer is infrastructure: a decade of cloud execution tooling, tens of millions of existing users, and a model that never requires developers to leave the browser.
The $9 billion valuation reflects investor conviction that vibe coding is a structural shift rather than a product cycle. Whether Masad's platform can stay ahead of a field moving at this pace is genuinely uncertain. But few people in the industry have been making this specific argument — that the next wave of builders won't look like developers at all — for anything close to as long.