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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.

“Our prediction internally is that you go from everyone using one agent to 10 agents to 100 agents to 10,000 agents at some point. You can't run 10,000 agents on your MacBook. There's no way you can do it. So eventually we're going to get away from local work in general.”

Y Combinator Startup Podcast · Startups & Venture · November 2026

“Our prediction internally is that you go from everyone using one agent to 10 agents to 100 agents to 10,000 agents at some point. You can't run 10,000 agents on your MacBook. There's no way you can do it. So eventually we're going to get away from local work in general.” — Amjad Masad, Y Combinator Startup Podcast

Context

Graham asked whether Replit is 'living in the future'. Masad answers with a forecast about agent counts per person, arguing that this scale forces work off the laptop and into the cloud.

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Transcript

Y Combinator Startup Podcast Around 37:46 into the episode
Amjad Masad

the future for sure.

Paul Graham

More even than AI specifically.

Amjad Masad

It's often frustrating. Like, I think that. Because stuff doesn't work. Well, stuff doesn't work and people change so slowly. So, for example, cloud development. Are people convinced about that now? Oh, yes. Still. How are they going to use AI? It's crazy. Exactly. So our prediction internally is that you go from everyone using one agent to 10 agents to 100 agents to 10,000 agents at some point. You can't run 10,000 agents on your MacBook. There's no way you can do it. Yeah,

Paul Graham

Robert proved that back in the 1980s.

Amjad Masad

Yes. So eventually we're going to get away from local work in general. But there's like people still predominantly do work on their desktop.

Paul Graham

Maybe this is what will finally convince them. Yes.

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

More from Y Combinator Startup Podcast

“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.” — Amjad Masad, Y Combinator Startup Podcast “That's not just true for programming. That's true for anything consumers use. If you make it 10% easier, you don't just get 10% more people. You get twice as many.” — Paul Graham, Y Combinator Startup Podcast