Replit

From Idea to Deployed App While Finishing My Coffee

I'm not a developer, but Replit's AI agent let me build a working internal tool for tracking vendor contracts in about 20 minutes. It wrote the code, set up the database, and deployed it. Did I understand every line? No. Does it work perfectly? Basically yes. For ops people who need quick internal tools, this is a revelation.

Great for Prototypes, Terrifying for Production

Replit's deployment model is 'push and pray.' There's no real staging environment, rollback is manual, and the infrastructure abstraction means you can't tune anything when performance matters. For internal tools and hackathon projects, it's magical. For anything with an SLA, I'd rather spend the time setting up proper infrastructure.

Cloud IDE That Gets Out of Your Way

Replit's AI agent can scaffold a full project from a description, which is useful for prototyping. The real value is the deployment pipeline — push code, it's live. No Docker, no CI config, no infra. For side projects and internal tools, this is hard to beat. For production apps, you'll outgrow it.