Michele Catasta, President of Replit

Michele got it all — a strong guy, an Italian, and a veteran of Machine Learning, AI and Data! And he is a great listener and a super fun guy to talk to. When inviting Michele to our Fika series, I found an old thread, from 2015, when I visited Florence for WWW conference and met Michele, then a student of Computer Science and a user of Scala, where I ran the biggest meetup in the world. We talked about Amazon Mechanical Turk (I used to be at Amazon).

Thus the recent spectacular success of Replit, the home of the cutting-edge AI code agent, comes as no surprise to me. Replit is named after REPL.it, with REPL standing for Read-Evaluate-Print Loop, a standard terminal-based UI for Functional Programming languages. Replit pioneered virtual terminals for a plethora of niche languages like Haskell, Erlang, and OCaml, way before they became successful in crypto, fintech and FAANG world. Those enthusiasts who wanted to try them but had no easy way to configure all the prerequisites could spin a terminal in the cloud and play.

The spirit of making it fun for developers carried over to the Replit Agent. The FP heart of Replit is beating strong in NixOS, the FP OS underpinning it and supported by Replit.

In our conversation at AI Dev, Michele talks about his career arc in software engineering and AI, how they built Replit, and how developers can engage with it at every level. Michele was on an insightful panel on agents before that, and this interview is a good companion to the panel. Recorded at our Neo4j sponsor booth — check our existing course on GraphRAG with deeplearning.ai and keep an eye on an upcoming sequel, Agentic AI with Knowledge Graphs!insigh