AI for software development
Replit AI
Replit AI provides developer intelligence and pair programming capabilities. I created ways to interact with AI in the workspace using code intelligence, retrieval augmentation, and agentic workflows.
Building a design system for AI tools
Previously, Replit AI was a simple chatbot and inline editing tool called Ghostwriter. We wanted tools that could interact with the workspace. The most common AI chat workflow requires copying and pasting code into the editor. We wanted Replit AI to have workspace awareness: inline edits, multiturn instruction, visibility of Shell and Deployments.
We developed a design system for Replit AI supporting threaded history, codeblocks and snippets from Shell and Deployment logs, error diagnosis, and command execution.
Defining hierarchies for context
Code Intelligence is the ability of an AI to understand and answer questions about a codebase. We ask language models: “What is this?” or “What does this do?” One of the more challenging aspects is defining what this represents. It could be the current file, a folder, the entire project, or external documentation.
“Context” is how the scope of a prompt is managed. Techniques for delivering context involve inferring or letting the user define segments of text based on desired scopes. These segments can be gathered through late retrieval or dumped to the model as a pre-prompt.
While we can infer some contexts automatically, I wanted to define a clear rubric for categorizing context types and create easy access points for users to manage them.
I chose @ for nouns and / for actions as primary keyboard triggers. @ appends a single context item. / describes a task like “explain” or “modify”. These combine into expressions that define scope and intent.
Assemble & Run Jobs
Early agentic workflow experiments included generative UI in the Replit AI chat. By stringing together prompts and interpreting returned lists as UI rather than raw text, we presented recommendations as tasks users could perform in sequence.