Masad Predicts You Will Use Fewer Apps and More Agents
Replit CEO Amjad Masad says agents will skip the app-building step, a shift he admits could undercut his own business.
Platformer · Replit’s CEO on building a company that can run itselfWhen Thomas Paul Mann, the chief executive of the software company Raycast, predicted that in about three years around half of the programs on a person's machine would be homemade, Amjad Masad, the chief executive of the coding company Replit, was asked to grade the call. He went further.
"In three years, we'll be using fewer apps, we'll be using more agents, and those agents will be using the apps on our behalf," Masad said.
Masad argues that the app is an intermediate step. "Right now, you have a problem, you make an app, you use that app to solve the problem," Masad said. His question is why you need the middle step at all, when you could articulate the problem and have it solved.
He said he sees it in his own habits. He still makes apps, but "oftentimes I just tell it to do the thing," as Masad put it. He believes many users of Claude, ChatGPT, and Codex, all AI assistants that can answer questions and take actions, are doing the same, skipping the app and letting the agent handle the task.
The way Masad describes it, the Replit agent is being built to learn. It stores memories, and creates skills for itself out of software, connections to other programs, and scripts it can reuse. "Agents will be better at using your browser than you are," Masad said, so a person could send a message and the agent would operate the desktop software in the background.
It is a prediction Masad admits might sound damaging to Replit, a company that exists to help people build apps. He expects an explosion of self-made apps first, and then a decline. Users, he said, will move from prompting to expressing intent, where they describe a larger problem and the agent figures out what software to write or use to solve it.
Questions people ask
What exactly is an agent, as opposed to an app?
An app is software you open and operate yourself, like a calendar or spreadsheet. An agent is an AI assistant you instruct in plain language, and it then operates apps, browsers, and files to complete the task. In Masad's vision, you state the goal and the agent does the clicking and coding.
Will regular apps disappear?
Masad does not describe apps vanishing. He expects an explosion of apps, followed by a decline, and he says roughly half of the apps people still use directly may be self-made. His point is that you will open fewer of them directly, because agents will open and operate many of them for you.
How would I actually tell an agent what to do?
The way these systems work now is through text or chat, often inside tools like Replit, ChatGPT, or Claude, where you describe the outcome you want. Replit is also interested in building loops as a planned capability, where you would express a larger intent and the agent would figure out what software to write or use to solve it.