Amjad Masad
Founder and CEO of Replit, the online coding platform he co-founded in 2016 with his wife Haya Odeh and his brother Faris.
“I think with AI, everyone will have to go through this period of denial and then depression and then eventually acceptance. I had that in 2020. I had the grief of the craft that I love is gone. I've already grieved.”
Y Combinator Startup Podcast · Startups & Venture · November 2026
Context
Graham was recalling his own horrified reaction to Masad's early agent demo. Masad says all engineers will go through stages of grief over AI writing code, and that he went through them early.
Transcript
No, everyone was realizing that. Like, I think I've been seeing like engineers that were also repulsed by that. I remember your tweet was very controversial when I tweeted that.
That guy who generated vast amounts of code using AI. Yeah.
Well, even that tweet about me being the one. Bill and object code and all of that was also controversial. But now all engineers are, you know, I think with AI, everyone will have to go through this period of, you know, denial and then, and then sort of later on, you know, depression and then, you know, eventually acceptance. Yeah. I've had it like in like 2020, you know, really. And so, and so it just makes it easier for me. Like, I had the grief of the craft that I love is gone. I've already grieved. You
felt that too. Yeah. Okay. So you knew what I was feeling. I
knew what you were feeling. When you showed me that demo. Yes. But you had to feel it so that you can let go.
I think everybody got convinced at the end of last year. At the end of 2025 is when everybody realized, okay, AI is going to write all the code.
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