Replit in Review: A Recap of What We Shipped in 2023

Ornella Altunyan

In 2023, we brought the vision of idea to software, fast, to reality. We shipped the first conversational AI programmer to code your ideas faster, made AI available for everyone, and introduced Deployments to ship from where you write your code. We made coding on Replit a better and more productive experience by redesigning the Console, Git integration, Packages tool, and more. We released the Replit Desktop App so you could choose the form factor that works best for you. We’re not finished making Replit the best place to code, but here are some highlights from the past year!

Product

(01/29) Git in the Shell - The first step in improving our Git integration. Git command-line tools were improved and integrated with your GitHub account, allowing access to your repositories.

(02/14) Announcing Ghostwriter Chat - The first conversational AI programmer. Ghostwriter Chat is a beta release that acts as a proactive debugger and understands your project’s context, making it a powerful AI pair programmer.

(02/16) Celebrating 20 Million Replit Developers - We reached a milestone of 20 million developers who have created over 240 million Repls. Thank you!

(03/02) Remote Access to Your Repls via SSH - Another step towards increasing developer productivity. Remotely access your Repls through SSH.

(03/27) Replit and Google Cloud Partnership - Announcing our partnership with Google to advance generative AI for software development. Replit developers now get access to Google Cloud’s infrastructure and services.

(04/11) Replit Deployments - The fastest way from idea to production. Deployments are a complete rebuild of Replit’s application hosting infrastructure that lets you quickly go from idea to production right from where you code.

(04/25) A Recap of Replit Developer Day - We announced production-grade Deployments, a more powerful Workspace, Extensions, and Replit’s Code Complete model.

(05/01) Replit Extensions - Create your own custom integrations on Replit with Extensions.

(05/29) Configurable Keybindings - One of our most requested features. You can now customize your keyboard shortcuts, enhancing the usability and discoverability of features in the Workspace.

(06/24) Code Search - Search through your code with queries, queries, regular expressions, include/exclude patterns, and replacements. Refactoring and efficient searching in large codebases is now painless.

(07/19) Increased Storage Capacity - Large projects and AI model development are no longer an issue. We bumped storage capacity from the 1 GiB limit to over 256 GiB.

(07/30) Deployments Updates - We made Deployments even better and more production-ready. Apps are now hosted on Google Cloud VMs, making Deployments more than 3x faster and more reliable.

(07/31) Filetree Updates - New year, new filetree. Featuring better performance and accessibility, Replit's filetree was rebuilt for better performance and accessibility, virtualization for efficient rendering, and enhanced keyboard accessibility, making it easier to navigate large projects.

(08/07) Expandable Storage - Even. More. Storage. Expandable Storage allows you to increase storage per Repl up to 1 TiB, meeting the needs of larger projects, especially AI applications requiring more storage for files and dependencies.

(08/15) Secret Scanner - 2023 was the year of the API call. Do it securely with Secret Scanner – automatic detection and warning about potentially exposed API keys or Secrets in your code. Better security and best practices, built in.

(08/10) Ghostwriter Inline - Explain Code, Generate Code, and Edit Code were improved for efficiency, including persistent inline widgets, streaming AI suggestions, and enhanced review experiences with diff views.

(08/24) Powered Up Package Manager - The Packages tool got a massive upgrade with features for faster loading, simpler management, easier troubleshooting, responsive resizing, and enhanced error handling for a smoother package handling experience.

(09/05) Autoscale and Static Deployments - More Deployment options for more flexibility. Autoscale Deployments scale up or down based on app traffic for cost-efficient scalability. Static Deployments for free client-side site hosting, like blogs and websites.

(09/12) Replit ModelFarm - Build Generative AI applications on Replit, with no API key management required. Replit ModelFarm gives you secure access to 3rd-party Gen AI providers and free access to select Gen AI models for members.

(09/13) Replit Desktop App - Code where it feels right. We branched out from the browser and launched the Replit Desktop App for macOS, Windows, and Linux. With more keyboard shortcuts, native devtools, and more integrations with the OS and file system.

(10/09) Replit AI for All - AI is everywhere, all the time. And now it’s free on Replit. We said goodbye to Ghostwriter and hello to Replit AI for All, making code completion and assistance free for all users. Members get access to even more advanced AI models and features.

(10/10) Replit Code V1.5 3B Model Release - Replit Code V1.5 3B was trained on 1 trillion tokens of code for code completion tasks and supports 30 programming languages. And it’s all open source on Hugging Face.

(10/12) Smarter Indentation - Seemingly small feature, huge win for developer productivity. We launched new indentation features, including automatic indentation detection for opened files, a status bar element for current indentation settings, smarter pasting that adjusts indentation, and an option to display different kinds of whitespace in the editor.

(10/20) System Dependencies on Replit - Less thinking about setup, more coding. The System Dependencies tool, powered by Nix, allows for easy addition, removal, and search of system dependencies like ffmpeg, gcc, and vim in a Repl. This tool simplifies managing native programs or libraries globally within a Repl.

(11/14) Replit Core - Best of Replit, one low price. Replit Core bundles advanced AI, scalable Deployments, a faster Workspace, exclusive community events, and partner perks into one comprehensive membership for $20/month.

(12/7) New and Improved Console - We heard your feedback about the Console, and we launched a revamped UI, persisted execution history, metadata about runs, and integrated features with the Package Manager and Debugger.

(12/19) GitHub x Replit Workflows - Your code lives on GitHub, so we made it easy to import, maintain, and deploy it on Replit with a new GitHub import form, improved authentication, and redesigned Git Pane. New features include improved branch selection, a detailed commit view, flexible repository initialization, and unborn branch management, along with enhanced Git workflows that integrate Replit's unique features.

Infrastructure

(03/16) Worldwide Repls, Reduced Latency - We continued to reduce latency for developers globally by dividing the infrastructure into multiple failure domains with clusters, transitioning to an SQL-backed Control Plane, and creating a custom load balancer.

(04/05) Code Without Restarts - Code for hours with no interruptions. Upgraded VMs significantly reduce container restarts for members by 10x. The upgrade was enabled by Margarine, Replit's next-generation storage system.

(05/25) Super Colliding Nix Stores - We collaborated with Obsidian Systems and Tweag to enhance Nix, enabling the merging of multiple Nix stores. This update brings Nix Flakes and enhanced development environment portability to millions of Replit developers, offering a consistent software development environment across various platforms and access to a massive collection of Nix packages without impacting your Repl's storage limits.

(08/03) Fewer Restarts and Faster Networking - Reduced reconnection and loss of program state, for everyone. All network connections to Repls now use Google Cloud’s Premium Tier network service, which is 40%+ faster than Standard, enhancing connection speed and reliability.


(09/05) Speeding up Deployments - Deployments are now faster, thanks to Lazy Image Streaming. This technique uses a special filesystem (FUSE) to start the container before the entire image is downloaded, cutting over 3 minutes from Repl deployment times.

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