Amjad Masad: prediction

Transcript context

…So say you're a PM listening to this, an engineer or designer, what skills do you think if you were one of these folks? If you were in building Replit right now, what kind of skills would you suggest folks focus on more and would you think are just like, okay, this can be less valuable in the future, don't worry about these sorts of things? And you can either pick one of those three functions or all three. I think a very important scale that's perhaps harder to develop but it's worth working on is being generative, being more generative, being able to generate new ideas quickly, because you can think about it as a factory line. So you have ideas, you have the production of these ideas or the initial production of these ideas, and then you have other people that want to consume these ideas or work with you on these ideas. And so typically you're bottlenecked by the middle part where your ideas are kind of like they're a lot of them and they're not fitting in, because they need to be made and they need to be made quickly. And so now you open up that bottleneck. So now actually making things is a lot easier. Actually, you become limited by how fast you can generate ideas, and I find that true of myself as well. I consider myself quite generative, but now I have this tool and I can build a lot more and explore a lot more and I'm finding that, well, actually, I'm running out of ideas sometimes. So training that muscle I think is a good thing. I think learning a little bit of coding and not the traditional way of learning coding. If you go to a coding bootcamp, they're going to start with what is Git? Actually my co-founder, Haya, was a designer. When we're first building the Replit together, she went to WebAssembly to do a coding course. And the first day, they spent this whole time on Git and she's like, "What is that? What does it do?" I still don't know what it exactly does, but it's like you're inverting the process, you're giving the tool before the actual problem. And so I think all of that stuff, you don't have to worry about, so things that you don't have to worry about. I think a lot of the, as a PM, as a designer, as someone who's not in your code editor every day, don't worry about all the tooling. And if you learn a little bit of coding just by talking to an AI, doing a little bit of debugging, building something with Replit, running into a problem and trying to fix it just using AI, you'll learn a bit of coding. And I have this that's been called not by me, dubbed as Amjad's Law, which is the return on investment for learn to code is doubling every six months. And really just learning a little bit of that skill, learning a bit of skill about how to prompt AI, how to read code, and be able to debug it. Every six months, that's netting you more and more power because you're going to be able to create a lot more. It's going to be easier to create. You're going to be able to create a lot more complete things. So that's another skill that I think could be necessary. This is super interesting. Okay, so this last point, you made Amjad's Law. It's interesting because when people, as someone's listening to this, I could see them being like, engineers are in trouble. Why do you need engineers at this point? These agents are building the code. Your point is specific engineering skills are going to be incredibly valuable and more and more. How often are they doubling would you say? Every year you said?…

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