Replit’s CEO sees work moving toward self-driving companies. At TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco on Thursday, Replit CEO and co-founder Amjad Masad described a future where AI agents handle much of the grunt work while people become more valuable for their judgment and taste.
“The reality is, all of our jobs — perhaps everyone in this audience, especially — changed over the past year,” Masad said. He argued that AI technology has changed every job, turning the question from whether work will change into what people should do with the time and responsibility left behind.
Masad said Replit’s team examined how AI affected its workplace over the past year, especially after AI agents became more reliable earlier this year. The company then changed how it operates, moving toward what he called the closest analogy to a “self-driving company.”
Agents handle the loop, people make the calls
At Replit, support tickets are first examined by an agent, which performs the initial triage. When a request reaches a person, that person receives additional information before deciding how to proceed; the agent handles the first pass, but the human still owns the judgment.
The same pattern continues when support work produces a patch. After a support person submits it, deploying the patch becomes a click to an agent. Replit’s company is “sort of self-improving,” Masad said, with a lot of work driven by agents rather than handled manually from start to finish.
That does not mean people vanish from the process. “You have an entire loop where agents did most of the work, but crucially, there’s human judgment in the middle, and we don’t think that’s going away anytime soon,” Masad said. “You need human judgment; you need taste.”
That distinction is the heart of Replit’s vision. Agents are changing what people work on, not taking jobs from them, according to Masad. The machines take on repetitive work, while people spend more time deciding what deserves attention and how the result should take shape.
A less boring version of work
Masad said Replit now spends more time on discussions, whiteboarding, architecture, and building things. Those activities replace less engaging work with decisions and creative work — a familiar promise from AI, though one that becomes more concrete when tied to support tickets and deployment.
The future of work, in his view, involves discovering what AI transformation means in practice. Replit talks with other businesses about how AI can help people become more productive and happier at work, while Masad said AI agents make work less boring and more creative.
That is the positive case for the self-driving company: agents manage more of the operational loop, but people remain responsible for direction, judgment, and taste. “There’s a positive vision of the world that Silicon Valley is not really putting out, and we’re hoping to do that,” Masad said.
The pitch is not that companies can remove people and press start. It is that companies can redesign work around what people are better at, using agents for the grunt work and humans for the choices that still require judgment. Apparently, the future of work needs fewer chores and more whiteboards.
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