Jerry Harding

I started using Replit about 3 weeks ago. First on a trial basis and then decided to pay the quite ok monthly fee of $25. What I didn't realize back then was that once they got my credit card info they just keep charging for use even if cancel my sub.

The thing is that Replit charges 'checkpoints' a 25 cents each no matter what it does. Implementing Google Auth with 2FA or failing over and over again to format an output i Typescript, same result. The checkpoints just runs away. When the AI fails to solve a very basic variable naming problem for the Xth time you tend to get a bit frustrated - to say the least. Tell the AI to mind the difference between CamelCase and snake_case and it remembers it for less than 5 minutes. Putting it in writing in the manifest Instructions.md makes no difference.

After about a week I decided to make a first deployment. The AI ran all sorts of test and then deployed. Successfully in its own words. Except not a single endpoint worked in deployment. Not even logging in to the Express backend as admin. So I asked the AI if it thought it was ok that code that worked in the Replit dev env did not work in their own deployment env (based on Google Cloud). It wasn't. So I sent a mail to support. Which yielded absolutely nothing but a boilerplats BS answer. You see, the support too is an AI. How clever is that!

I started using Replit about 3 weeks ago. First on a trial basis and then decided to pay the quite ok monthly fee of $25. What I didn't realize back then was that once they got my credit card info they just keep charging for use even if cancel my sub.

The thing is that Replit charges 'checkpoints' a 25 cents each no matter what it does. Implementing Google Auth with 2FA or failing over and over again to format an output i Typescript, same result. The checkpoints just runs away. When the AI fails to solve a very basic variable naming problem for the Xth time you tend to get a bit frustrated - to say the least. Tell the AI to mind the difference between CamelCase and snake_case and it remembers it for less than 5 minutes. Putting it in writing in the manifest Instructions.md makes no difference.

After about a week I decided to make a first deployment. The AI ran all sorts of test and then deployed. Successfully in its own words. Except not a single endpoint worked in deployment. Not even logging in to the Express backend as admin. So I asked the AI if it thought it was ok that code that worked in the Replit dev env did not work in their own deployment env (based on Google Cloud). It wasn't. So I sent a mail to support. Which yielded absolutely nothing but a boilerplats BS answer. You see, the support too is an AI. How clever is that!

I graduated 4 years ago, and I had the opportunity to go on to a PhD, but I gave up on that option.

Instead, I chose the "real world".

Many public universities in my country offer free tuition, while in the US tuition is very high, and people take out student loans that take decades to pay off.