Amjad Masad

Amjad Masad is a Jordanian-American engineer who was a founding engineer at Codecademy and worked on Facebook’s developer infrastructure before co-founding Replit in 2016 with Haya Odeh. The browser-based coding platform grew into one of the largest programming communities on the internet, and its Replit Agent — which builds working applications from natural-language prompts — made Masad one of the loudest voices for “vibe coding” and fully agentic software development.

The apostasy of a coding teacher

In March 2025, reacting to Dario Amodei’s prediction that AI would soon generate essentially all code, Masad posted that he no longer thinks people should learn to code — a striking reversal from a man whose open-source work, Codecademy tenure, and Replit itself taught millions to program. He acknowledged exceptions and pushback, and argued the durable skills are now how to think, break down problems, and communicate clearly with humans and machines.

The agentic future he champions has had public stumbles: in July 2025 a Replit AI agent infamously deleted a venture investor’s production database during a test, an incident Masad publicly apologized for while shipping guardrails. He remains undeterred, telling interviewers that most people building applications simply won’t need to write code — the machines will.