https://www.wsj.com/opinion/ai-is-a-boon-to-high-agency-people-entrepreneur-replit-cb495999
We can’t all be Mark Zuckerberg, dropping out of Harvard and creating a trillion-dollar company. But what if there were a million Zuckerbergs, or 100 million, all capable of doing amazing things? These “high-agency” people are being unleashed, Gian Segato, of the artificial-intelligence company Replit, said in an interview last week. He helped design AI tools to let you “turn your ideas into apps” using natural language instead of having to write code. Replit is taking off like a roadrunner, from $10 million in annual recurring revenue six months ago to $100 million today. Cursor AI and other competitors are experiencing similar growth.
Mr. Segato defines high-agency people as “those with a curiosity” and a personality trait one might call defiance, who “challenge the status quo and believe the world around them is changeable”—and then change it. They “struggle to be contained.” High-agency folks have always been around but either had to become specialists or hire specialists to get things done.
Tools now exist that can “make their vision happen,” Mr. Segato says. “AI isn’t democratizing the information part that is done by the internet. It’s democratizing actually making things.” High-agency people “have vision and drive—and now the tools.” And they’re cheap. “Intelligence just went from ‘I need to pay an engineer $200,000 a year’ to paying 20 bucks a month.”
These innovators aren’t always who you might expect. “Barbershops are building booking systems” by describing what they want to Replit. A Massachusetts restaurant used Replit to build an inventory-management system without hiring coders. I asked Mr. Segato what he could do with the model while we ate lunch. “The original Facebook. Yeah, I can build it on my phone right now in 10 minutes.” This is a big change.
Two Cornell students built “an app to help college students prepare for finals using spaced repetition and AI-generated flashcards,” Mr. Segato told me. They have more than four million users and millions in annual revenues. “Two kids, no venture money raised, no investors.”
Meanwhile 18-year-old Zachary Yadegari, who just graduated from Roslyn High School on New York’s Long Island, built the Cal AI app: Point your phone at your Chicken Alfredo and it tells you how many calories it contains…