Developer tooling startup Replit Inc. is looking to challenge GitHub Inc. and others with the launch today of a new, artificial intelligence-powered coding tool that it says will vastly improve the efficiency of software developers.

The new product, called Replit Teams, is similar to GitHub’s Copilot tool, It provides access to an AI agent that works alongside developers in real time to suggest fixes for coding errors or recommendations to improve the efficiency of the code they write.

Replit briefly announced Replit Teams on its blog before diving into its capabilities in a second, extremely technical blog post that goes into extensive detail on its efforts to integrate large language models and AI agents with its browser-based integrated development environment. The news was later picked up by Semafor, which said the product is comparable to something like Google Docs, only it’s focused on coding.

The company is best known for its browser-based IDE, which provides an alternative to the traditional desktop applications typically used by developers. The advantage of having a browser-based IDE is that it’s much easier for developers to get up and running, since there’s virtually nothing to set up prior to launching the platform, unlike with desktop-based IDEs that can take several hours to configure. With Replit, developers can simply navigate to the right URL and immediately start coding.

Replit Teams is a new capability within the startup’s web-hosted IDE platform, which enables multiple developers to collaborate on code. For developers, the experience will feel as if another programmer is working alongside them, like an editor, making suggestions as they work in order to enhance their productivity.

Founder and Chief Executive Amjad Masad told Semafor that the AI agent requires no prompting – instead, it just jumps straight in and presents code fixes, which the developer can then accept or reject. In this way, it ensures humans will always remain in control.

Masad said the company plans to enhance Replit Teams and add more AI agents into the mix, specializing in different aspects of coding. However, for end users, it will appear as if their AI assistant is just getting smarter and more capable as it gains experience.

The launch of Replit Teams builds on the startup’s Ghostwriter Chat tool that was announced last year. Ghostwriter Chat, the company’s first AI coding tool, works by generating code based on text prompts provided by developers. Developers simply outlines the function they require, and the tool will generate the code that enables it. That’s different from Replit Teams, which doesn’t require any prompting, simply spitting out suggestions when it deems them to be appropriate.

When it launched Ghostwriter Chat last year, Replit said it was using large language models provided by Google Cloud, as part of a wider partnership between the two companies that involved various product integrations. But it’s not clear if Replit Teams is also using one of Google’s LLMs.

Masad told Semafor that the product is based on a “proprietary AI model that specializes in software development” but didn’t elaborate. However, he insisted that it vastly outperforms OpenAI’s GPT-4 in coding benchmarks, despite being just a fraction of the size, at just 7 billion parameters versus more than 1 trillion.

Replit has made significant progress over the last year, announcing a $100 million funding round from investors including Andreessen Horowitz and Khosla Ventures, shortly after launching Ghostwriter Chat, bringing its valuation to over $1 billion. At the last count, it said, its IDE platform is being used by more than 20 million developers globally.

It has successfully disrupted the market for IDEs but it faces some significant competitors in the AI coding space. Of course there’s Microsoft’s GitHub, which recently announced a more advanced version of its Copilot tool that can be customized to a company’s codebase and processes.

Other rivals include Amazon Web Services Inc., which offers AWS CodeWhisperer, plus nimbler startups such as JetBrains s.r.o. Tabnine Ltd., ServiceNow Inc., Hugging Face Inc. and Nvidia Corp. are also collective rivals with their open-source StarCoder2 family of AI coding assistant models.

Then there’s Cognition AI Inc., which recently announced a prototype model called Devin that does more than just suggest code. It replaces the human developer entirely, generating a full codebase from scratch, based on a natural language description of the desired application.

Replit has an advantage over Devin, which has yet to launch its autonomous developer tool formally, as well as many of its competitors thanks to its roots as an IDE platform. The fact its IDE has been available since 2016 means it has accumulated a lot more coding data than many of its rivals.

It also offers a “bounty” service, where companies can hire freelance developers through its platform to create the code they require. The data from that business could be especially useful to Replit’s AI coding ambitions, as its customers’ bounties outline the kind of code they want to be created in a way that’s very similar to how someone might prompt an AI coding assistant.

Masad declined to be drawn on what his competitors are doing, but he told Semafor that Replit’s tools are seeing accelerated adoption at big enterprises. “They’re asking us for this,” he said of the company’s newest tool.

Replit Teams is available in beta now, but access is very limited. Interested developers can sign up to its whitelist here and wait for an invite.

Image: Replit