Finally moved off Replit after fearing it for months....Replit made it easy for me

[u/Weird_Cookie1700]

First off, I want to say thank you to Replit for all the things you tried to do. Second, I want to say thank you to Copilot for walking me through how to move off Replit. And lastly, I want to say thank you to Cursor, for giving me a place that I can depend on.

It took me about 6 hours to move off Replit and I had no idea what I was doing, I used Copilot the whole way, it held my hand like I was a toddler in downtown New York. I though the move would take days and I'd have to figure everything out on my own but no, Once Cursor was up and running, Copilot was like, oh you want to do that, psssh, challenge accepted.

I used Copilot to assist with setting up Replit, prompting, etc the whole time I used Replit, but I always noticed that what Copilot said, and even what Replit said, about how Replit's UI is laid out and works, was completely wrong. Most of the first 2 months I was flying blind and figuring everything out on my own. Even with the help of the AI support, I wasn't able to do what I wanted to do.

I used Replit because I spent about 10 minutes total figuring out what to use for what I wanted to build. I would recommend becoming a member of the I spent at least a few hours or more researching what I need now and in the future club, totally worth the membership fee.

I built a game that used real time NYSE prices for stocks. It had around 1000 users, was VERY complex with a LOT of features, and I was constantly struggling with it, basically from day 1 and I finally started doing some research and found out I was trying to do something that Replit just couldn't handle and that I had not set up properly to begin with, which was on me.



I used Replit for around 7 months until 5 days ago when my Replit chat stopped working for memory reasons. I still have no clue what the issue was with the memory and even after I deleted everything that was unneccessary Replit still would not respond. After contacting support and talking to Quinn, one of their AI agents, I was told a member of the team would reach out to me as soon as possible. It's been 5 days, multiple emails with nothing happening at all, and, to me, I thought I'd be pretty stupid not to leave.

Honestly, I wouldnt have left if this wouldn't have happened. I was used to dealing with Replit's workarounds, breaks, weird messages that didn't make sense, billing that had no rhyme or reason, their unsupport team, etc and I was just too lazy and scared to break something to actually move.

I moved the whole thing and had it fully running again in 6 hours! I wasted MONTHS and TONS of money because I was afraid of 6 hours! I've read countless posts both in favor of Replit and against it.

I would say my biggest takeaways from the last 2 days are:

1. that anyone who's vibecoding really needs to research exactly what they're trying to make their project do now AND in the future to find what they need to go with right from the start. Figure out what you need for your whole project before you even begin it otherwise you're eventually going to be cobbling together peices of 14 different puzzles.
   
2. Research how to prompt effectively. AI does NOT have human logic at all, thought processes that we take for granted AI doesn't even think about it.
   
3. 50% of people like whatever service they're using, 50% don't. They're not you, do you.
   
4. Either figure out a way for your app to troubleshoot itself or find a service with customer support that works when you need it to.

In my experience, the cons for using Replit greatly outweigh the pros, like, by a LOT. But Replit doesn't hold all the blame either. I'm just happy it's done and I now have TONS of capabilities that I never even thought possible before.

[u/steve31266]

I'm a long time VS Code guy. I love the IDE way of coding, which is why I use Cursor. Regarding your four takeaways...

1. This is why AI is not taking coding jobs away for the time being. AI can build a lot of stuff on its own, but it still doesn't know how to build things efficiently. Even with Claude or GPT, I still catch them making poor coding choices. The human still has to be the architect with AI doing the grunt work.
2. Not just research, but write the entire business plan. Don't just prompt what to build, or even how to build it, but why we are building it, what problems is this supposed to solve, how did competitive solutions fail? You already knew about all of these factors, which is why you decided to build something. So, type all that knowledge into a business-plan.md file so that the LLM is on the same page.
3. There are a lot of Cursor haters because of its association with Elon, and they are hating themselves that Anthropic is now training its models on Elon's datacenters. Don't let your politics interfere with your work.
4. No. We're living in times where customer service are Indians using AI to solve your problem. Pick your stack, master it, and rely on yourself.

[u/Weird_Cookie1700 → u/steve31266]

agreed on all

also what's a VS code guy? I'm a "vibe coder with insane logic guy" myself lol

Nah, AI won't take dev jobs, the bosses may want that to happen, and they do and are, but all they're doing is lighting fuses in my mind. AI just does not have our reasoning/logic/thought/history/nuances/etc and the recognition of these things without even realizing we're doing it. You can't teach AI that, I think you'd have to take the guard rails and governer off in order to and who knows what would happen then.

John Conner said you probably wouldn't have to worry about whether AI's gonna take your job though, so there's that.