Before I joined Replit, I had never written a line of code.
A few weeks ago, I built a Slack Bot that uses Google LLMs to provide daily channel summaries. You can fork the template or get started with 100 Days of Code.
None of this was possible without Replit. Let me explain why:
- Getting started with no setup
- Using Replit AI capabilities
- Learning LLMs with ModelFarm
- Simple hosting and deployments
Getting started with no setup
I studied Finance, Marketing, and Math. I never took a single Computer Science class. During my time playing professional baseball, I tried to learn to code to earn some money to support my training. At Boston Consulting Group, I attempted to learn Python to automate some basic data manipulation and scraping tasks we did.
Every time, I would get stuck early on. It would take far too long to see any output. The process was too slow, high-friction, and boring. Half of my time felt like it was just spent getting set up.
Fast forward to last year, and we released 100 Days of Code on Replit. It was the best experience I had ever had:
- No wasted time to set up my development environment
- Daily, digestible lessons
- Video and written content directly in the editor, so there was no tab and context switching
- Ghostwriter helped with the boilerplate code to make me super efficient in later lessons
Within days and weeks, I was building legit projects, and I was using these skills to improve my day-to-day work at Replit.
Once you learn how easy getting started can be, you won’t go anywhere else. Replit is the only place I will ever code.
Using Replit AI capabilities
Replit’s AI helped me learn in 100 Days of Code faster, but it is also super helpful with creating new projects and understanding other projects. For example, for my Slack bot, I began with a simple prompt:
Generate code that allows me to call on the Slack API and log the messages from a specific Slack channel
I knew nothing about the Slack API. I had not visited the docs yet. I wanted to start with Ghostwriter.
import os
from slack_sdk import WebClient
from slack_sdk.errors import SlackApiError
slack_token = os.environ["SLACK_API_TOKEN"]
client = WebCl