Subscribe
Sign in
I started using Replit about 3 weeks ago. First on a trial basis and then decided to pay the quite ok monthly fee of $25. What I didn't realize back then was that once they got my credit card info they just keep charging for use even if cancel my sub.
The thing is that Replit charges 'checkpoints' a 25 cents each no matter what it does. Implementing Google Auth with 2FA or failing over and over again to format an output i Typescript, same result. The checkpoints just runs away. When the AI fails to solve a very basic variable naming problem for the Xth time you tend to get a bit frustrated - to say the least. Tell the AI to mind the difference between CamelCase and snake_case and it remembers it for less than 5 minutes. Putting it in writing in the manifest Instructions.md makes no difference.
After about a week I decided to make a first deployment. The AI ran all sorts of test and then deployed. Successfully in its own words. Except not a single endpoint worked in deployment. Not even logging in to the Express backend as admin. So I asked the AI if it thought it was ok that code that worked in the Replit dev env did not work in their own deployment env (based on Google Cloud). It wasn't. So I sent a mail to support. Which yielded absolutely nothing but a boilerplats BS answer. You see, the support too is an AI. How clever is that!
Well I toiled on and after about two weeks and some $250 worth of checkpoints I had a working web for matching local contractors with local property owners. A hyper local matching service. Then when I'm running the last tests before my third deployment I suddenly notice that the admin password is changed back to a very unsafe password I used the first days of developing. Looking through the pages of my app (not too many in total) I realised that the AI had reverted back to several days old code. When I asked to have the code from last night back the AI happily restored a 2 weeks old backup taking me even further back. It then told me that it had not changed anything in the code, that someone else must have changed the code and that there were no newer code available. This is when I gave upp and told the AI to go F*CK itself.
For Valentine's day I used @Replit to make an app (PWA) that lets me and my partner "hug" via notifications, and has an exploding heart when we're both touching a button at the same time.
What I'm stoked on: I was able to get a prototype in minutes even though it had a lot of flaws. It took me a couple of sessions over a few days to build an app that kind of works. This was pretty mind-blowing, as my coding ability is fairly rudimentary (background in data science and I've done some basic javascript but never built a standalone app). Using @Wispr Flow sped things up and also was impressive - It's cool to see the little touches that Wispr has implemented to improve dictation, and I'm just impressed by the speed and fluidity of using it on desktop. As a side note, using Wispr has made me increasingly frustrated at how poor iOS's built-in voice dictation is. What I'm frustrated by: I had to restart building the app a couple times because when I would try to get it to fix certain things, it would create more problems. It felt like working with a very fast but extremely inexperienced developer who has no sense of when they're off on a dead-end in the maze. I haven't developed an intuition on when to use agent and when to use assistant. Replit shows how the agent is more expensive than the assistant, which stressed me out a bit. Although I realized I never hit the threshold where it started charging me more than my normal subscription. So I think it was just a psychological thing. It had repeated errors around web socket connections and dealing with notifications on iOS. I had to get deeper and deeper into these myself, and in one case, teach it how to do notifications properly on iOS. It turned out that Replit's information was outdated, and it thought that it is not possible to do native notifications with a PWA on iOS. So I had to actually get code from ChatGPT to teach it. It was stressful to make a change knowing that I could break and was likely to break many other things, and I didn't know how to properly create a checkpoint that I could fall back to. It creates checkpoints all the time, but I couldn't figure out how to name a checkpoint or save it in a way that was easily recoverable. Because it takes some time for Replit to compile, I've found myself doing other things like work, little tasks, or even watching a TV show while waiting for Replit. But then I had to keep checking because it wouldn't send me a notification. I wonder if there's a way to send notifications? Help me make my workflow better! What am I doing wrong / what could I be doing that I'm not doing?
