Developer tooling startup Replit has launched a new AI tool called Replit Agent that can help users build apps from scratch within minutes. Early access for the tool has been given to Replit account subscribers for now. 

“AI is incredible at writing code. But that’s not enough to create software. You need to set up a dev environment, install packages, configure DB, and, if lucky, deploy. It’s time to automate all this,” Amjad Masad, founder and chief executive of the startup said while announcing the release. 

Masad also posted a video clip of himself building and deploying an app. He enters a prompt in natural language and the agent responds with a plan and starts coding automatically. 

During this, the agent also keeps describing what it’s doing as it is doing it. These steps can also be edited by users. Once the app is ready, the agent asks for feedback from the user before adding API passkeys and deploying it. 

He added that the tool can be used easily on the phone too.

The news quickly gained traction on X as noted personalities from the industry and investors started sharing it. 

Andrei Karpathy, co-founder of OpenAI and former director of AI at Tesla commented saying the development could be placed under “feel the AGI category,” a slogan often raised within AI startups like OpenAI that anticipates the arrival of artificial general intelligence - point where machine intelligence surpasses human intelligence. 

In April, Replit launched an AI assistant for coding similar to GitHub’s Copilot tool called Replit Teams, which works alongside developers and suggests fixes for bugs and recommends ways to improve the code while its being written.

Founded in 2016, Replit raised $20 million in funding in November last year from Craft Ventures. Before that, its last major funding round was in April when they raised $97 million pegging the startup’s valuation at $1.16 billion then.