Building towards a holistic development service — Amjad Masad

We as developers tend to separate our development tools by the stage of the development lifecycle: authoring, executing, building, or deployment. But this limits how much information each tool has at it’s disposal and therefore how much utility it can provide. For example, your IDE can show you the callers of a particular function but because it it’s not involved in running your code it can’t tell you how many times that function failed at runtime. Even worse, we end up with a lot of redundant implementations of the same functions – for example parsers – because it’s easier than sharing the work.

At Replit we’re growing a holistic development service from the ground up. At first our service just executed user code. Then it gained code intelligence capabilities like Lint. Then it understood the project structure and dependencies. Then it knew how to test code. And now it’s growing to understand deployment. All this within a single service. We envision this to become a long-lived always-on service that understands your code in all it’s stages and can be at your disposal anywhere you are regardless of the device, platform or the programming language you’re using.