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AM Amjad Masad 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.

“That's the thing about the AI business today: you have to just accept that everything you're doing is getting commoditized constantly. And you have to zoom in.”

Y Combinator Startup Podcast · Startups & Venture · November 2026

“That's the thing about the AI business today: you have to just accept that everything you're doing is getting commoditized constantly. And you have to zoom in.” — Amjad Masad, Y Combinator Startup Podcast

Context

Graham asked whether the shrinking agent harness makes it easier for competitors to catch Replit. Masad says yes, and describes the treadmill of constantly moving on to the next thing.

Transcript

Y Combinator Startup Podcast Around 05:27 into the episode
Amjad Masad

…you make it work? And the crazy thing, Paul, is that the harness circuit 24 is 10 times more complex than the harness today because the models were less capable. Yeah. So as models get more capable, like what the kind of the engineering you have to do to make them become agents is less and less so.

Paul Graham

Does that mean it's easier for people to compete with you?

Amjad Masad

Yes. But we have to do, well, that's the thing about the AI business today is that you have to just accept that everything that you're doing is like getting commoditized constantly. And you have to like zoom in. Be doing

Paul Graham

the next thing. Be

Amjad Masad

doing the next thing, right? But the other big thing that we demonstrated is that AI can provision infrastructure. So up until that point,

Paul Graham

you actually have infrastructure to provision. Yes. That's the thing that's different between you and all these competitors, right?

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

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