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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!
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?
The Replit Agent is an AI-powered tool designed to assist users in building software projects. It can understand natural language prompts and help create applications from scratch, making software development more accessible to users of all skill levels.
🤖 Cutting-edge framework for orchestrating role-playing, autonomous AI agents. By fostering collaborative intelligence, CrewAI empowers agents to work together seamlessly, tackling complex tasks.
In AI code development, crafting precise instructions and specifications is crucial. Existing tools like ChatGPT and Claude often generate overly generic PRDs. That s why we built AtomicPRD a smarter way to create detailed, structured PRDs quickly and effortlessly. It breaks requirements into AI-friendly, consumable chunks, making it easier for AI tools to convert them into actual code.
