Vibe Coding and The Rise of AI Agents with Amjad Masad and Yohei Nakajima

Hey, everybody. This is Ben Kesnoka, cofounder and partner at Village Global, a network driven venture firm. And this is our podcast where we go deep on all things business and technology with world leading experts. Good morning. Good afternoon. Good evening, villagers, wherever in the world you may be today. I'm Ben Kesnos, a partner here at Village Global, a network native venture firm. In today's hour, we're gonna start by talking some high level points about AI agents and the state of play. We'll transition to talk a little bit about investing in AI applications and where there's really durable value in the ecosystem right now. And then in the back half, we'll transition to talking about building agents and building AI products. So we'll start with Amjad Nasad on stage, then we'll invite you, Hey Nakajima on stage, who's an early builder of AI agents to join the conversation. So for the founders who've joined us today, we'll get fairly applied in the second half of the conversation. In the first half of the conversation, we'll cover a bit more of the conceptual landscape and topics related to investors. And throughout this hour, we might even build a thing or two and wrap what ourselves in real time. We'll see. So I'm John Nasad. He grew up in Jordan teaching himself to code on a borrowed computer. Today, of course, CEO, cofounder of Replit. He started Replit in 2016 with a mission to make software creation as universal as literacy. As many of us know, the September 2024 debut of Repla Agent, a conversational agent that can spin up full stack applications in minutes, was a phenomenon in Silicon Valley. So few people have a clearer, more practical view of how autonomous software agents will reshape engineering and development. Amjad's also an active angel investor, partner in a fund that we've anchored at Village. So we have a very close relationship on many levels. Amjad, welcome. Thank you. Really excited to be here. So let's start in practical terms. What, in your view, can AI agents do today? What are the most impressive use cases? And then what will what will they be able to do twelve months from now? How complex will the tasks be? Yeah. I think there are, like, broadly two two use cases. One, you might call coding, but I think it's a little more general than that. And it is, like, computer use broadly. People think of computer use as, like, something like operator, but, actually, it is more like you give the model a virtual machine, and it knows how to execute code on it, install packages, write scripts, use apps, do, as much as possible with the computer. Now this technology unlocks coding agents, but you could do other things with it. And this is where these two use cases kinda start to overlap. The second one is informational, and that deep research is the is the is the biggest …