The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch 20Product: Replit CEO on Why Coding Models Are Plateauing | Why the SaaS Apocalypse is Justified: Will Incumbents Be Replaced? | Why IDEs Are Dead and Do PMs Survive the Next 3-5 Years with Amjad Masad
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Apr 25, 2026 
Amjad Masad, Replit co-founder and CEO building AI-powered software tools, talks about why coding models may be plateauing and why product quality still wins. He digs into model routing, the coming pressure on SaaS, whether IDEs are fading, who should still study computer science, and how AI is turning product and ops teams into builders.
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Maintainable Vibe Coding Requires AI Reviewing AI
- Maintenance becomes viable when AI writes code, tests it in a browser, reviews every change, and loops failures back into the coding agent.
- Replit spends significant tokens on code review and testing, which Amjad Masad says makes its output more maintainable than lighter vibe-coding tools.
Token Prices Stay Sticky Even As Intelligence Gets Cheaper
- Token unit prices have not collapsed as fast as expected, even though the effective price of intelligence has fallen sharply.
- Amjad Masad attributes that to limited frontier competition and expensive NVIDIA hardware beneath nearly every provider.
IDEs Are Dying But Cursor Still Has A Market
- Cursor is not dead because AI coding is an expanding market with room for multiple products and sticky enterprise deployments.
- Amjad Masad says IDEs are effectively dead as intelligence tools, but some engineers will still want code visibility for high-risk software.
