Amjad Masad on What Young People Should Learn in the AI Era

Key points

1. 1

   Young people are there to question the rules

   Masad opens with the novel The City and the Stars, where a glitch produces the one person who asks what lies outside the city. He says that is the job of the young in any society. Today's college does the opposite and trains students to follow. You can do well in college and still end up jobless with a large debt, so the old bargain is broken.

   “And I think ultimately the utility of the young people is to question deeply held beliefs”

2. 2

   Starting a startup at 18 is premature optimization

   Masad borrows the programmer's rule that premature optimization is the root of all evil. He sees teenagers raise money out of envy of friends who built unicorns, then commit to an idea they do not care about. He says he tried not to start Replit until it pulled him in. Investors who hand Stanford students a million dollars before they have an idea strike him as "somewhat predatory."

   “I think a lot of starting startups is premature optimization”

3. 3

   Follow the itch, even into chess

   Masad took up chess late, wrote programs to solve positions, then trained a model because ChatGPT makes up chess moves. Along the way he saw that AI can now do machine learning work, the way agents learned to code around Replit Agent's 2024 launch. The hobby became a Replit product that lets a business owner with data train a model. No plan would have routed him from chess to a new business line.

   “I realized that AI is actually, you know, capable of doing ML.”

4. 4

   Agents fix what killed holacracy

   Holacracy at Medium and GitHub's no-managers experiment both failed. Masad says the cause was missing technology. Agents can now run the bureaucracy in the background and judge impact, so people can work on what interests them. He has started running Replit as what he calls a self-driving company, and he admits the idea is not fully formed.

   “I think it was a technology problem. Like I think now like you can have agents kind of function as the glue”

5. 5

   The learn-to-code fight is over

   Every Replit meeting room carries the name of a computing pioneer, to show the company respects the past and still means to change it. In 2025 Masad was attacked for saying people should stop learning to code. A year later, he says, the same engineers tell him they no longer read code. They prompt for it.

   “I was like canceled for for saying you shouldn't learn how to code anymore”

6. 6

   Go deep enough to teach him something

   Asked what makes an 18-year-old stand out, Masad puts depth first: one project followed all the way through. Most people get bored and fall back on the usual path, so depth signals persistence and drive from within. He pairs it with respect for the other person, since smart young people are quick to decide everyone else is an idiot.

   “I think the first thing is that they dove really deep in something they can teach me something”