Intuitive Explanations

Oh, internet drama. I love internet drama! So I looked it up as I never heard this story before.

https://intuitiveexplanations.com/tech/replit/

Looks like this CEO isn't of good character after all. He looks almost like a jerk when looking at the end of the story. Even in his last email he tried to get his (obviously wrong) point. He never apologized for the things that mattered most, only tried to extinguish the social media fire all in all.

Also he doesn't look very smart, imho:

https://amasad.me/meta

Big LOL here! The abstract things are the simplest, yeah! That's why progress in something like math or theoretical physics is made by the dumbest people, in contrast to something like sociology where you need genius level of intelligence to come up with some new ideas. Sure, sure.

But that's of course not everything this dude got completely backwards.

Would explain why replit is the most useless of all the online IDEs: It has no direction, no true value proposition. It's not a good cloud coding environment. It never was a good code snippet playground (actually one of the worsts). Now they even require accounts, so the quick code snippet aspect is also gone. Also they badly positioned in the education space…

Of course I wish them luck!

But I guess they have no chance against something like Gitpod, Github, or OpenShift codespaces, which are light-years ahead.

OK, maybe the exit-strategy is "just" to be visible enough that at some point they get bought by one of the…

It doesn't matter if he used replit they don't own the code you write with it and it doesn't matter if he used to work there they don't own former employees either.

If you remove the irrelevant details it can be shortened to A personal created what could be construed as a replit competitor this seemed like a bad idea which only makes sense if it's a bar owned by the mafia.

Furthermore they didn't respond "with a heavy hand" This statement carries the implication that some reaction was warranted and they overdid it.

A manipulative sociopath reacted to a non-issue by using insane threats to silence someone on the off chance that he might become a legitimate competitor.

Did you catch the part where he made it about him him growing up a "struggling kid from Jordan" whist still essentially asserting most of the same position.

https://intuitiveexplanations.com/assets/amjad-hn-1.png

This is basically a narcissist simulating a normal person territory.

It's basically saying sorry you made the projected economic cost of my bad behavior negative I'm going to save face here.

> working on a project that does pretty much the same kind of thing they're doing

Radon outlined why this isn't true. [1]

> basically spreading some of that knowledge you gave them and making it packaged and accessible not only to future contributors of their project, but to all competitors and genuine copycats out there.

It appears as if you're advocating that Radon should've treated the open-source code as if it was closed? [1]

> This is incredibly unprofessional

In what world is it unprofessional to work on a personal side project that has ZERO commercial interests and is using 100% public open-source code? This is actually one of the most professional online disagreements I've ever seen..

> Show some respect to your ex-boss and collegues who are working hard for several years

hUHH ???

[1] https://intuitiveexplanations.com/tech/replit/evidence

Your (non)apology is insincere and it is quite obvious that you don't really mean it. Looking at the latest communications with the intern[1], you are 'giving him permission' which isn't yours to give. And further, you have quoted them out of context. Neither of these actions indicate that you are in any way remorseful, nor do you see what you are doing wrong.

You haven't let _us_ down, you are only harming yourself and your company. I believe what you need is some self reflection, and a PR agent who can handle these situations for you with bland neutral language. Without these you will never do better in the future.

[1] https://intuitiveexplanations.com/assets/replit-email-9.png

The most concerning part about that whole interaction was this small detail (here's the full post: https://intuitiveexplanations.com/tech/replit/):

In the earlier emails, Amjad Masad (the CEO) offered to hire the intern, was pleasant, etc. And then just a few threads later, when things turned sour, he insulted the former intern, calling him the "most demanding intern we've ever had."

It's deeply telling about a person's character when they pull this kind of move -- kind & understanding one moment, negging & insulting the next, even if it contradicts their earlier kindness.

I tend to agree. It seems like the author of the article already addressed this accusation [0]. I admittedly am biased in favor of OSS authors but I tend to agree with the points he made there. Namely, this product doesn’t clone any design decisions that aren’t already public. More importantly, Replits differentiator isn’t the ability to run code in browser (which tons of other projects already offer), it’s the polish and support that comes with scaling that idea.

[0] https://intuitiveexplanations.com/tech/replit/#is-replit-right